Firms choose debt structure and competing banks choose monitoring intensity. Monitoring improves credit allocation, but creates informational lock-in effects in bank-borrower relationships. In a competitive credit market, banks dissipate anticipated profit from serving locked-in borrowers...

This paper surveys empirical and theoretical studies of various control mechanisms embedded in venture capital contracts. These mechanisms mitigate incentive problems and opportunistic behavior arising in the uncertain environment of financing young hightechnology enterprises that predominantly...

This paper surveys empirical and theoretical studies of various control mechanisms embedded in venture capital contracts. These mechanisms mitigate incentive problems and opportunistic behavior arising in the uncertain environment of financing young hightechnology enterprises that predominantly...

This paper considers the role of equity transfer to strategic alliance partners in mitigating the moral hazard problem that occurs if a participating firm faces some possibility of reallocating a part of the resources devoted to the joint project of the strategic alliance or retreating from the...

Using a sample of long-term supply contracts collected from SEC filings, I show that hold-up concerns and information asymmetry are important determinants of contract design. Asymmetric information between buyers and suppliers leads to shorter term contracts. However, when longer duration...

This study analyzes the impact of corporate governance structures at the initial public offering date. We test hypotheses that firms with more shareholder-oriented governance structures receive higher valuations at the IPO stage, attract more institutional ownership, and have better long-term...

There is widespread evidence supporting the conjecture that borrowing constraints have important implications for firm growth and survival. In this paper we model a multi-period borrowing/lending relationship with asymmetric information. We show that borrowing constraints emerge as a feature of...

This paper examines how firm characteristics, legal rules and financial development affect corporate finance decisions. In contrast to the existing literature, I use data on unlisted companies to show that institutions play an important role in determining the extent of agency problems. In...

We examine the relation between firm reputation and the cost of debt financing. We posit that corporate reputation represents “soft information” not captured by balance sheet variables, which is nonetheless valuable to lenders. Using Fortune magazine's survey of company reputation while...

I investigate the aggregate consequences of canonical financial frictions in the supply of credit to firms: private information and limited enforcement. I propose a general equilibrium model in which entrepreneurs finance their firm through a long-term contract with a financial intermediary. The...