This paper tests how subjects behave in an intertemporal consumption/saving experiment when borrowing is allowed and whether subjects treat debt differently than savings. Two treatments create environments where either saving or borrowing is required for optimal consumption. Since both treatments share the same optimal consumption levels, actual consumption choices can be directly compared acro...

U.S. corporate leverage has decreased markedly since 1992. We find greater institutional ownership explains this deleveraging trend. Without institutions’ influence, total leverage would be eight percentage points higher today. Detection of this relationship was elusive since researchers often combine all years and institutions. Yet legal barriers to institutional activism persisted until 1992....

The recent interest in the valuation of tax benefits from debt arises from the disagreement in the existing literature about the meaning of “value of tax shields.” Although it is accepted that the value of a firm increases as effect of the tax deductibility of interest, the correct valuation of this extra-value is controversial. In this paper we adopt a risk-neutral approach to derive a general...

We describe and analyse the portfolio structure of Dutch households using micro panel data from the CentER Savings Survey, 1993-1998. The data allows for a distinction between many types of assets. Moreover, we have information on mortgage debt, consumer debt, etc. We analyse the composition of household portfolios and the level of portfolio diversification, and its relation to age, birth cohor...

The assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit has been an implicit or explicit theoretical foundation of many empirical studies on remittances. This paper directly tests this assumption by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households using panel data from Mexico for 2002 and 2005. While the occurrence of serious health shocks that req...

Credit Risk Analysis and Security Design* This Paper considers the potential cost of subjective judgement and discretion in credit decisions. We show that subjectivity and discretion in the evaluation of borrowers create an incentive problem on the part of the lender. The lender’s incentives to accept or reject a borrower depend only on the value of their own claims, not on the total value of t...

Article history: Received 7 January 2010 Accepted 13 August 2010 Available online 21 August 2010 This paper simultaneously analyses optimal dividend, debt and investment policy within a conventional multi-period DCF framework, and takes account of differential personal taxation over both investors and types of income, the effect of dividends and interest on the level of share issues and hence s...

We examine the effect of lending banks’ board representation (affiliated banker on board, or AFB) on conservative accounting. We argue that private information obtained through board representation enhances the monitoring and the influence of lenders and therefore reduces their demand for conservatism-facilitated debt contracting. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that conservatism is mar...

In this paper, we have revised and updated our earlier study in order to analyze the most recent (second) draft of the BIS’s proposed reforms of bank capital requirements. We conduct Monte-Carlo experiments using data on defaults and severity rates on publicly-traded US corporate bonds over the 1981–1999 period. Analyzing the whole period and various sub-periods, it is clear that the most recen...

We investigate whether controlling shareholders expropriate corporate resources during a financial crisis using the data of Thai firms. Our results are consistent with the argument of Friedman, Johnson, and Mitton (2003) that the propensity to tunnel and prop is higher for business groups in particular if they are organized in pyramids. Specifically, we find that firms that belong to the top 30...