Overconfidence and Early‐Life Experiences: The Effect of Managerial Traits on Corporate Financial Policies

We show that measurable managerial characteristics have significant explanatory power for corporate financing decisions. First, managers who believe that their firm is undervalued view external financing as overpriced, especially equity financing. Such overconfident managers use less external finance and, conditional on accessing external capital, issue less equity than their peers. Second, CEOs who grew up during the Great Depression are averse to debt and lean excessively on internal finance. Third, CEOs with military experience pursue more aggressive policies, including heightened leverage. Complementary measures of CEO traits based on press portrayals confirm the results.     

Bank Competition: Measurement,Decision‐Making,and Risk‐Taking

This paper investigates whether greater competition increases or decreases individual bank and banking system risk. Using a new text‐based measure of competition, and an instrumental variables analysis that exploits exogenous variation in bank deregulation, we provide robust evidence that greater competition increases both individual bank risk and a bank's contribution to system‐wide risk. Specifically, we find that higher competition is associated with lower underwriting standards, less timely loan loss recognition, and a shift toward noninterest revenue. Further, we find that higher competition is associated with higher stand‐alone risk of individual banks, greater sensitivity of a bank's downside equity risk to system‐wide distress, and a greater contribution by individual banks to downside risk of the banking sector.     

Adverse Selection With Frequency and Severity Risk: Alternative Risk‐Sharing Provisions

The analysis considers an insurance market with adverse selection where individuals' loss distributions may differ with respect to both the frequency and severity of loss. We show that the combination of deductibles and coinsurance can be used to sort rationed policyholders. Because of their screening properties, coinsurance and deductibles may both be equilibrium forms of risk sharing for a particular insurer facing asymmetric information, with different rationed consumers choosing different risk‐sharing provisions.     

Financing Shipping Companies and Shipping Operations: A Risk‐Management Perspective

Shipping has always been a volatile and cyclical business. The extreme changes in revenues, operating cash flows, and asset values during the recent financial crises have upset the usual means of financing shipping companies. While bank debt will remain important in the future, the new regulatory environment has been forcing shipping banks to shift these risks from their balance sheets to capital markets through instruments such as loan securitization. As a result, the shipping industry will increasingly look to capital markets for external funds. And shipping banks are likely to change from being commercial bank lending institutions to becoming more like investment banks that arrange a variety of financing solutions, including high yield bonds or public equity. Risk management will be central to shipping companies in this new environment. Shipping companies can manage their own risks by modifying operations, employing freight and vessel price derivatives, or adjusting their capital structures. To arrive at the value‐maximizing combination of these three basic methods, they must decide which risks to bear, which to manage internally, and which to transfer to the capital markets. These decisions require shipping financial managers to assess the effect of each risk on firm value, understand how each contributes to total risk, and determine the most cost‐effective way to limit that risk to an acceptable level.     

Bank Leverage and Monetary Policy's Risk‐Taking Channel: Evidence from the United States

We present evidence of a risk‐taking channel of monetary policy for the U.S. banking system. We use confidential data on banks’ internal ratings on loans to businesses over the period 1997 to 2011 from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Terms of Business Lending. We find that ex ante risk‐taking by banks (measured by the risk rating of new loans) is negatively associated with increases in short‐term interest rates. This relationship is more pronounced in regions that are less in sync with the nationwide business cycle, and less pronounced for banks with relatively low capital or during periods of financial distress.     

Stealing Deposits: Deposit Insurance,Risk‐Taking,and the Removal of Market Discipline in Early 20th‐Century Banks

Deposit insurance reduces liquidity risk but can increase insolvency risk by encouraging reckless behavior. Several U.S. states installed deposit insurance laws before the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and those laws applied only to some depository institutions within those states. These experiments present a unique testing ground for investigating the effect of deposit insurance. We show that deposit insurance removed market discipline constraining uninsured banks. Taking advantage of World War I's rise in world agricultural prices, insured banks increased their insolvency risk and competed aggressively for deposits. When prices fell after the war, the insurance systems collapsed and suffered high losses.     

Reinsurance and Capital Structure: Evidence From the United Kingdom Non‐Life Insurance Industry

Using a data set consisting of statutory returns of U.K. non‐life insurers from 1985 to 2002, I find that insurers with higher leverage tend to purchase more reinsurance, and insurers with higher reinsurance dependence tend to have a higher level of debt. My results are consistent with the expected bankruptcy costs argument, agency costs theory, risk‐bearing hypothesis, and renting capital hypothesis. I also find that the impact of leverage on reinsurance will be weaker for insurers that use more derivatives than those that use less. Moreover, high levels of derivative use increase the leverage gains attributable to reinsurance.