Debt and Development

This paper examines incentive and valuation effects of debt financing on land investment. When land is debt financed, the landowner holds both a development option on the land and a default option on the debt. Because development typically devalues the default option, investment may be delayed past the point at which efficient investment would otherwise proceed. The incentive to underinvest is shown to be more pronounced as debt level increases, i.e., as the debt becomes riskier. This agency problem provides an explanation as to why land is generally difficult to debt finance and may also explain why debt levels are relatively low for “land-intensive” real estate firms. Novel comparative statics show that debt value may increase for a given increase in asset volatility as well as for a given increase in interest rate. Renegotiation and restrictive contract provisions are considered as mechanisms to promote efficient investment policy in the presence of debt financing.     

Information Acquisition and the Equilibrium Incentive Problem

I study the optimal incentive provision in a principal–agent relationship with costly information acquisition by the agent. I emphasize that adverse selection or moral hazard is the principal's endogenous choice by inducing or deterring information acquisition. The principal designs the contract not only to address an existing incentive problem but also to implement its presence. Implementation of adverse selection relies on a steeper information rent to the agent than the standard menu, such that the agent is motivated to distinguish the efficient state of nature from the inefficient. Moral hazard is implemented by replacing the benchmark debt contract with a debt‐with‐equity‐share contract, such that the agent does not attempt to acquire information to either avoid debt or to extract rent.     

Credit risk and asymmetric information: A simplified approach

We present a simple model for risky, corporate debt. Debtholders and equityholders have incomplete information about the financial state of the debt issuing company. Information is incomplete because it is delayed for all agents, and it is asymmetrically distributed between debtholders and equityholders. We solve for the equityholders' optimal default policy and for the credit spreads required by debtholders. Delayed information accelerates the equityholders' optimal decision to default. Interestingly, this effect is small, implying only a small impact on credit spreads. Asymmetric information, however, has a major impact on credit spreads. Our model predicts high credit spreads for short-term debt, as observed empirically in credit markets.     

Optimal financial contracts with hidden effort,unobservable profits and endogenous costs of effort

This paper studies financial contracting in a two-period financing model with double moral hazard, as entrepreneurial effort choices and profits are unobservable and non-verifiable. The optimal financial contract must induce both the high effort level and truthful revelation of profits. The paper further analyses the structure of the optimal contract where the entrepreneur's payoff takes a general functional form that allows for endogenously determined costs of effort. The entrepreneur's performance is influenced by not only extrinsic work motivation factors but also intrinsic factors so that the degree of control imposed by the investor, in the form of end-of-period transfers, affects the entrepreneur's costs of effort. The finding shows that under well-defined conditions, the optimal contract that solves a model with non-verifiable profits also elicits effort, and generally resembles a simple debt contract. The structure of the optimal contract is robust in the general case where the entrepreneur's payoff function is non-linear in transfers.     

Macroeconomic factors, consumer behavior, and bankcard default rates

Over the period from 1981 through 1999, we investigate the relationship between bankcard delinquencies and key macroeconomic variables. Changes in the proportion of accounts in default are statistically related to the consumer debt ratio. When the delinquency rate is calculated based on the number of dollars outstanding, it is related to the total amount of revolving debt. We also find evidence consistent with a pattern of selective default behavior, in which consumers will default on bankcard debt before defaulting on other types of installment loans.     

Efficient venture capital financing combining debt and equity

I present a model of venture capital contracting in which contracts that involve a mixture of both debt and equity are efficient and dominate pure-equity and pure-debt financing. The optimal contract balances the venture capitalist's incentive to intervene in the project and the entrepreneur's desire for control. Received: 9 September 1997 / Accepted: 3 April 1998     

Optimal securities under adverse selection and moral hazard

We consider project financing under adverse selection and moral hazard and derive several interesting results. First, we provide an explanation of why good firms issue both debt and underpriced equity (even if the bankruptcy and agency costs of debt are zero). Second, we show that, in the presence of moral hazard, adverse selection may induce the conversion of negative into positive NPV projects leading to an improvement in social welfare. Third, we provide a rationale for the use of warrants. We also show that a debt–warrant combination can implement the optimal contract. Our results have a number of testable implications.     

Project financing,entrepreneurial activity,and investment in the presence of asymmetric information

We analyze a two-period signaling model in which a representative entrepreneur in a regional economy has a project that generates a random cash flow and that requires investment that the entrepreneur raises from a competitive market. The project's type is known to the entrepreneur but not to the investors. Further, the entrepreneur is restricted to issuing debt only or equity only. We first show that there is no separating perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) contract involving the issuance of equity only, that there exists a pooling PBE contract involving the issuance of equity only, and that a debt contract is preferred to an equity contract by our entrepreneur. Next, we suppose that the entrepreneur incurs a non-pecuniary cost of financial distress F > 0 whenever he is unable to make a repayment at time t = 1. We provide conditions on F under which a pooling PBE contract with debt exists and a separating PBE contract with debt and equity exists. Finally, we examine whether a high type entrepreneur will prefer a setting with a cost of financial distress (F > 0) or a setting in which there is no such cost (F = 0).     

Growth option,debt maturity and cash reserves with bank-tax-interaction

In this paper, we assume a small and micro enterprise(SME, henceforth) invests in a project, of which the investment cost is funded by the private lending and the bank-tax-interaction (BTI, henceforth). We build a tractable model of optimal investment, liquidity and default decisions based on cash flows with liquidity shocks and profitability uncertainty. In contrast to the case with pure private lending, we discover that BTI delays investment and increases the firm value. Furthermore, BTI causes the SME to retain more cash reserves. We also find that the SME prefers to select the BTI as the main financing policy under the higher liquidity risk and small profitability uncertainty. Besides, the impact of debt maturity on financial policies with BTI depends on liquidity shock.     

Risk sharing,risk shifting and the role of convertible debt

This paper considers a financial contracting problem between a risk neutral entrepreneur and a risk averse investor. Once the venture is started, the entrepreneur chooses an action that determines the riskiness of the venture’s payoff. When action choice is contractible, the optimal risk sharing consideration under limited liability calls for a pure debt contract and the low risk action is adopted. When the action choice is not contractible, due to the risk shifting problem implementing the low risk action requires a deviation from the optimal risk sharing. I focus on situations where despite this deviation, the risk averse investor prefers to implement the low risk action and show that a convertible debt contract is superior to pure debt, pure equity and any mixture of debt and equity.     

Het Indian Statistical Institute te Calcutta Organisatie en werkprogramma

The Indian Statistical Institute at Calcutta.
After an introductory statement on the organisation of official statistics in India the author describes the various departments of the Indian Statistical Institute, and its contributions to the development of sampling methods, in mathematical statistics and theory of probability, biometrics, psychometrics, statistical quality control, demography and economic development planning. The Institute occupies a leading position in India as a national and international centre of statistical research and training at very advanced levels.     

E-optimal minimally connected block designs under mixed effects model

Summary Considering a mixed effects model in a minimally connected block design set-up, we obtain designs which areE-optimal, uniformly in the ratio of the variance components, for inference on varietal contrasts which constitute the fixed effects in the model. Work supported by the Centre for Management and Development Studies, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Work supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under grant number 7272 and partially done while visiting Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, India.     

The (Un-) importance of Chapter 7 wealth exemption levels

This paper examines the effects of the Chapter 7 wealth exemption level on welfare, bankruptcy filings, debt, and on asset holdings. I build a heterogeneous agent life cycle model which features uninsurable income and expense shocks. Moreover, households can borrow and save simultaneously. When a borrower defaults on her debt by filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, she can keep her assets up to the wealth exemption level. Wealth exemption levels are important for two reasons. First, they explain the extensive and intensive margin of the credit card debt puzzle. Around thirty percent of borrowers, both in the model and in the data, who borrow at high interest rates simultaneously save at low interest rates. However, these borrowers borrow and save only relatively small amounts, a few thousand U.S. Dollars. Second, ignoring the exemption level biases results because it overstates the costs of defaulting. The welfare gains from Chapter 7 compared to the European system, where debt is not discharged, are twice as high when exemption levels are positive compared to when they are ignored. At the same time, wealth exemption levels are unimportant in the sense that they have an impact only at low exemption levels. The effects of increases in the exemption level fade out very quickly. There is no strong positive relationship between exemption levels, which vary across U.S. states, and default rates in the model. This is in contrast to the previous literature, but consistent with the data. The reason is that those borrowers who might default do not own much wealth. Therefore, only very few households are affected by increases in the exemption level.     

Commercial mortgage underwriting: How well do lenders manage the risks?

Loan-to-value ratio and debt service coverage ratios have long been viewed as the two most important quantitative measures of the default risk of commercial mortgages. Option-based models of default provide strong theoretic support for the importance of original loan-to-value ratio. The same theoretical predictions have found strong empirical support in residential single-family mortgage analyses. However, recent empirical studies of commercial mortgage default have raised questions about the role of loan-to-value ratio in assessing the riskiness of commercial mortgages. These studies generally either find no relationship or a puzzling negative relationship between loan-to-value ratio and default. This paper uses a very large database of commercial loan histories to thoroughly investigate this issue. It finds strong evidence that loan-to-value and debt service coverage ratios are endogenous to the underwriting process. Lenders react to other—unmeasured—risk factors with credit rationing and pricing. As a result, unusually low loan-to-value ratio loans appear to have above average risk in other dimensions and their default probabilities are equal to or higher than average. The results show that the pricing spread that lenders establish as part of the underwriting process serves as an excellent summary measure of the riskiness of the loan. A test of lenders’ ability to appropriately price loan-to-value risk finds that, while there is some unpriced effect of loan-to-value ratio after controlling for the lender’s pricing, introducing lender pricing into the model removes the otherwise puzzling negative loan-to-value and default relationship previously observed in the literature.     

基于时间偏好不一致的最优关系租金与银企估值

基于时间偏好不一致性的理论框架,构建了银企合作的关系贷款模型,模型中银行的最优停贷决策被视为一项实物期权。数值结果表明,时间偏好不一致性会导致代理人选择更低的违约门槛,但借款人的融资成本会更高。在项目估值方面,相比时间偏好一致情形,具有时间偏好不一致特征的银行和企业项目价值都大幅减少。此外,幼稚型和成熟型代理人对比结果显示,幼稚型代理人的错误信念能够抑制由于时间偏好不一致而导致的违约风险上升,并且能够降低最优关系租金,从而减轻具有财务约束的企业的融资成本。构建的贷款模型不仅丰富了银企关系型借贷的相关理论研究,而且指出在代理人具有时间偏好不一致的条件下最优关系租金(融资成本)更高,这从行为金融的认知偏差角度为中小企业融资难、融资贵的困境提供了新的解释。     

Endogenous trading in credit default swaps

We introduce a real options model in order to quantify the moral hazard impact of credit default swap (CDS) positions on the corporate default probabilities. Moral hazard is widely addressed in the insurance literature, where the insured agent may become less cautious about preventing the risk from occurring. Importantly, with CDS the moral hazard problem may be magnified since one can buy multiple protections for the same bond. To illustrate this issue, we consider a firm with the possibility of switching from an investment to another one. An investor can influence the strategic decisions of the firm and can also trade CDS written on the firm. We analyze how the decisions of the investor influence the firm value when he is allowed to trade credit default contracts on the firm’s debt. Our model involves a time-dependent optimal stopping problem, which we study analytically and numerically, using the Longstaff–Schwartz algorithm. We identify the situations where the investor exercises the switching option with a loss, and we measure the impact on the firm’s value and firm’s default probability. Contrary to the common intuition, the investors’ optimal behavior does not systematically consist in buying CDSs and increase the default probabilities. Instead, large indifference zones exist, where no arbitrage profits can be realized. As the number of the CDSs in the position increases to exceed several times the level of a complete insurance, we enter in the zone where arbitrage profits can be made. These are obtained by implementing very aggressive strategies (i.e., increasing substantially the default probability by producing losses to the firm). The profits increase sharply as we exit the indifference zone.     

Endogenous debt constraints in collateralized economies with default penalties

The objective of the paper is to propose endogenous debt constraints that rule out Ponzi schemes and ensure the existence of equilibria in a model with limited commitment and (possible) default. We appropriately modify the definition of finitely effective debt constraints, introduced by Levine and Zame (1996) (see also Levine and Zame (2002)), to encompass models with limited commitment, default penalties and collateral. Along this line, we introduce in the setting of Araujo et al. (2002), Kubler and Schmedders (2003) and Páscoa and Seghir (2009) the concept of actions with finite equivalent payoffs. We show that, independent of the level of default penalties, restricting plans to have finite equivalent payoffs rules out Ponzi schemes and guarantees the existence of an equilibrium that is compatible with the minimal ability to borrow and lend that we expect in our model.     

中国省级政府债务风险测度与分析

将财政收入分解为税收收入,土地出让收入以及其他收入。假设三类收入分别服从扩散过程,利用伊藤引理和投资组合理论,建立地方政府债务违约概率测算模型。省级政府债务违约风险的评价结果表明：税收收入和其他收入对地方政府债务违约风险的影响较大,“土地财政”的影响相对较小;偿还债务的期限越长,地方政府债务的违约风险越低;东、中、西部地区的省级地方政府债务的违约风险存在显著差别。西部地区省份的违约风险最高,东部发达地区的违约风险最低。发债试点的8个省市的违约风险普遍较低。四是如果偿还期限为5年,有29个省份的地方政府债务违约风险低于50%。     

绿色债券发行能缓解企业债务违约风险吗？——基于多期DID模型的研究

运用理论模型对企业发行不同债券时的差异性情景进行分析,提出企业的绿色债券发行对自身债务违约风险存在抑制效应,并选取2016—2020年1604家上市非金融公司的年度面板数据,基于多期DID模型进行实证检验。研究表明：企业发行绿色债券可以显著降低自身债务违约风险;企业发行绿色债券可以通过缓解融资约束、降低债务融资成本、提高股票流动性和增强绿色声誉这四个渠道降低自身的债务违约风险;外部融资依赖度高、研发支出占比低、信息披露程度高和管理者短视程度低的企业发行绿色债券可以更显著地降低自身债务违约风险。政策上应该进一步引导企业合理发行绿色债券,推动绿色金融的发展。     

The association of default risk factors with the systematic risk of corporate bonds

This study examines the association between bond betas and default risk factors. We find that both long-term debt and the relative ratio of long-term debt to short-term debt increase the bond beta; two measures of profitability, net income/total assets and EBIT/total assets and a cash flow measure of cash flow from operations/total assets decrease the bond beta. A proxy measure of standard deviation of returns is also significantly negatively related to bond betas, confirming the prediction from the option pricing model. In addition, by using new cash flow measures in the discriminant analysis, we improve on the successful prediction rate of bond ratings.