We examine theories of leverage and debt maturity, focusing on the impact of firms’ investment opportunity sets and regulatory environments in determining these policies. Using results on strategic complementarities, we identify sufficient conditions for the theory to have testable implications for reduced-form and structural-equation regression coefficients. Obtaining testable implications for...

In the managerial myopia literature the firm always faces some agency problem or other market imperfection. It is unclear whether the myopic behavior found in these models is due to stock-based incentives or the model's other market imperfections. This paper points out that stock incentives do not lead to myopia unless they result in more emphasis on the short-term than would occur under an opt...

This paper investigates whether market competition enhances firms’ incentives to hide profits. We develop a theoretical model of firms’ profit hiding behavior in competitive environments and derive several testable hypotheses. We then test the model using a database that covers more than 20,000 large-and-medium-sized industrial firms in China during the period 1995-2002. Our findings show that ...

During the latter part of the 1990s the introduction of the euro, the dramatic increase in the supply of venture capital in most EU countries, and the creation of several ‘new’ equity markets targeted at innovative firms have dramatically transformed the financing prospects of European entrepreneurial firms. In this study we contribute to a deeper understanding of their actual relevance by (i) ...

There is a wide cross-country variation in the institutional structure of bank failure resolution, including the role of the deposit insurer. We use quantitative analysis for 57 countries and discussion of specific country cases to illustrate this variation. Using data for over 1,700 banks across 57 countries, we show that banks in countries where the deposit insurer has the responsibility of i...

Using newly available data at the firm level, this study provides convincing evidence of the importance of financial constraints in explaining the timing of innovations in the German services sector. Based on a dynamic model of firms‘ optimal R&D behavior under financial constraints, we estimate various versions of an econometric specification of the model with dichotomous innovation data by us...

ABSTRACT We study the optimal information system in a debt contracting setting which managers can engage value destroying risk-shifting behavior. The issues early-warning signals that allow lenders to take corrective actions such as liquidating unprofitable projects. When are empire builders, exhibits conservative bias leads excessive and project liquidations relative first best. In contrast, w...

This paper aims at measuring the loss in the value of a firm due to the gamble for resurrection, in a standard contingent claims model. Just before a debt repayment is due, the equityholders of a levered firm can decide to shut the firm down or to keep it as an ongoing concern. We study how leverage affects the operating decision and we provide a closed form formula for the associated agency co...

When a candidate for the top management position is pre-associated with the firm, prior information exists that partially reveals his suitability for the position. In a dynamic framework of job matching, we show that in the presence of such pre-appointment information, the firm’s decision on managerial appointment differs in significant ways between inside and outside candidates. The difference...

There is a general perception that the large trading volume in initial public offerings is mostly due to ‘‘flippers’’ that are allocated shares in the offering and immediately resell them. On average, however, flipping accounts for only 19% of trading volume and 15% of shares offered during the first two days of trading. Institutions do more flipping than retail customers and hot IPOs are flipp...