We develop a model of a credit rating agency in which the rating agency expends due-diligence effort to learn about the issuer's credit risk, and the precision of its rating is predicated both on this effort and the rating agency's a priori unknown ability. We model the communication of ratings...

More than fifty years ago, Modigliani and Miller proposed that, in the absence of taxes, capital structure is irrelevant in the sense that it does not affect firm value. Since then, three sets of theories (signaling, agency, and tradeoff models) have reasserted the relevance of capital...

We examine the design of control rights of external financiers and how these interact with the firm's security issuance and capital structure when the firm's initial owners and manager may disagree with new investors over project choice. The first main result is an ex ante managerial preference...

We examine the design of control rights of external financiers and how these interact with the firm's security issuance and capital structure when the firm's initial owners and manager may disagree with new investors over project choice. The first main result is an ex ante managerial preference...