The practice of resetting strike prices on underwater executive stock options has drawn criticism for weakening managerial incentives. Our model shows that although the anticipation of resetting can negatively a!ect initial incentives, resetting can still be an important, value-enhancing aspect of compensation contracts, even from an ex-ante standpoint. In fact, we "nd that some resetting is al...

Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard threatens this benefit. Studying the trade-off between screening and moral hazard, the paper characterizes optimal mechanisms. Popular all-or-nothing reward-crowdfunding schemes reflect thei...

Although the 1940 Act restricts interfund lending within a mutual fund family, families can apply for regulatory exemptions to participate in interfund lending. We find that heterogeneity in portfolio liquidity and investor flows across funds, funds’ investment restrictions, and governance mechanisms influence the fund family’s decision to apply for interfund lending. We document several costs ...

We derive the optimal crowdfunding contract of a financially constrained monopolist and analyze its implications for production, investment and welfare. Crowdfunding contracts may serve as a price-discrimination mechanism, forcing pivotal consumers to pay a premium above the future spot price, thus increasing profits. When raising funds is costly, entrepreneurs balance the benefits from price d...

Government ownership of banks is very common in countries other than the United States. This paper provides cross-country, bank-level empirical evidence about political influences on these banks. It shows that government-owned banks increase their lending in election years relative to private banks. This effect is robust to controlling for country-specific macroeconomic and institutional factor...

We study how equity and debt contracts commit investors to discipline managers. Our model shows that the optimal allocation of debt, equity, and control rights depends on which disciplinary action is more efficient. When the efficient action is managerial replacement, then control rights should be allocated to equity holders, and capital structure should consist of equity and long-term debt. Wh...

We study the monetary-transmission mechanism with a data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured U.S. commercial bank from 1976 to 1993. We find that the impact of monetary policy on lending is stronger for banks with less liquid balance sheets—i.e., banks with lower ratios of securities to assets. Moreover, this pattern is largely attributable to the smaller banks, those in t...

This paper studies an incentive rationale for the use of group lending as a method of financing liquidity-constrained entrepreneurs. The joint liability feature associated with group lending lowers the liquidity risk of default but creates a free-riding problem. In the static setting, the free-riding problem dominates the liquidity risk effect under a plausible condition, thus making group lend...

We study a novel aspect of a firm’s capital structure, namely the profile of its debt maturity dates. In a simple theoretical framework we show that the dispersion of debt maturities constitutes an important dimension of capital structure choice, driven by firm characteristics and debt rollover risk. Guided by these results we establish two main empirical results. First, using an exogenous shoc...

It is typically less profitable for an opportunistic borrower to divert inputs than to divert cash. Therefore, suppliers may lend more liberally than banks. This simple argument is at the core of our contract theoretic model of trade credit in competitive markets. The model implies that trade credit and bank credit can be either complements or substitutes. Among other things, the model explains...