Safety-net benefits conferred on difficult-to-fail-and-unwind banks in the US and EU before and during the great recession

This paper investigates the links between regulatory arbitrage, financial instability, and taxpayer loss exposures. We model and estimate ex ante safety-net benefits from increased leverage and asset volatility at a sample of large banks in US and Europe during 2003–2008. Hypothesis tests indicate that, in both crisis and precrisis years, difficult-to-fail-and-unwind (DFU) banks enjoyed substantially higher ex ante benefits than other institutions. Compared to the US sample, safety-net benefits prove significantly larger for DFU firms in Europe and bailout decisions are less driven by asset size. Introducing a proxy for differences in government susceptibility to regulatory capture helps to explain bailout decisions in Europe. Our findings suggest that authorities in both venues could better contain safety-net benefits if they refocused their information systems on monitoring volatility as well as capital.     

Liquidation Values and Debt Capacity: A Market Equilibrium Approach

We explore the determinants of liquidation values of assets, particularly focusing on the potential buyers of assets. When a firm in financial distress needs to sell assets, its industry peers are likely to be experiencing problems themselves, leading to asset sales at prices below value in best use. Such illiquidity makes assets cheap in bad times, and so ex ante is a significant private cost of leverage. We use this focus on asset buyers to explain variation in debt capacity across industries and over the business cycle, as well as the rise in U.S. corporate leverage in the 1980s.     

The Financing and Redeployment of Specific Assets

We model the role various forms of nonrecourse secured debt play in efficiently redeploying assets whose value is state-specific. Ex ante, an entrepreneur and an asset redeployer make noncontractible state-specific investments in the primary and next-best uses of an asset, respectively. The redeployer provides a secured nonrecourse loan equal to the value of the asset in the critical state that separates the good and bad states. In the event of a bad state, this contract averts ex post bargaining over the asset's quasi-rents on redeployment and leaves the parties' ex ante investments undistorted.     

Information Risk and Fair Values: An Examination of Equity Betas

Using a sample of U.S. financial institutions, we exploit recent mandatory disclosures of financial instruments designated as fair value level 1, 2, and 3 to test whether greater information risk in financial instrument fair values leads to higher cost of capital. We derive an empirical model allowing asset‐specific estimates of implied betas, and find evidence that firms with greater exposure to level 3 financial assets exhibit higher betas relative to those designated as level 1 or level 2. We further find that this difference in implied betas across fair value designations is more pronounced for firms with ex ante lower‐quality information environments: firms with lower analyst following, lower market capitalization, higher analyst forecast errors, or higher analyst forecast dispersion. Overall, the results are consistent with a higher cost of capital for more opaque financial assets, but also suggest that differences in firms' information environments can mitigate information risk across the fair value designations.     

Bank capital,interbank contagion,and bailout policy

This paper develops a theoretical framework in which asset linkages in a syndicated loan agreement can infect a healthy bank when its partner bank fails. We investigate how capital constraints affect the choice of the healthy bank to takeover or liquidate the exposure held jointly with the failing bank, and how the bank’s ex ante optimal capital holding and possibility of contagion are affected by anticipation of bail-out policy, capital requirements and the joint exposure. We identify a range of factors that strengthen or weaken the possibility of contagion and bailout. Recapitalization with common stock rather than preferred equity injection dilutes existing shareholder interests and gives the bank a greater incentive to hold capital to cope with potential contagion. Increasing the minimum regulatory capital does not necessarily reduce contagion, while the requirement of holding conservation capital buffer could increase the bank’s resilience to avoid contagion.     

Information asymmetry and firms’ credit market access: Evidence from Moody's credit rating format refinement

I exploit Moody's 1982 credit rating refinement to examine its effects on firms’ credit market access, financing decisions, and investment policies. While firms’ ex ante yield spread can partially predict the direction of refinement changes, firms with refinement upgrades experience an additional decrease in their ex post borrowing cost compared with firms with downgrades. The former subsequently also issue more debt and rely more on debt financing over equity than the latter. Lastly, upgraded firms have more capital investments, less cash accumulation, and faster asset growth than downgraded firms. These findings show that credit market information asymmetry significantly affects firms’ real outcomes.     

Bank capital regulation as an incentive mechanism: Implications for portfolio choice

This paper contrasts the conventional interpretation of prudential capital regulation as a system of ex ante enforcement (`hard wired') with an alternative interpretation as a system of sanctions for ex post violation (`incentive based'). Under the incentive based interpretation risk-weightings affect portfolio choice only when assets are illiquid. Under both interpretations, the medium term impact on portfolio allocation depends upon the relative costs of debt and equity finance. Viewing enforcement as incentive based suggests there is relatively less need to match risk weightings accurately to portfolio risk.     

Corporate asset purchases and sales: Theory and evidence

Purchases and sales of operating assets by firms generated $162 billion for shareholders over the past 20 years. This contrasts sharply with the evidence on mergers. This paper characterizes the behavior of value-maximizing firms, which could grow organically, purchase existing assets, or sell assets. The approach yields an endogenous selection model that links asset purchases and sales to fundamental properties of the firm. Empirical tests confirm the predictions of the model. In particular, return on assets and size strongly predict when firms purchase or sell assets, and the transaction size covaries with the value of capital employed by the firm. These findings indicate that corporate asset purchases and sales are consistent with efficient investment decisions.     

Venture capital funds: Flow-performance relationship and performance persistence

This paper finds that venture capital funds that are expected to be backed by more skilled investors show no performance persistence but a significant flow-performance relationship. In contrast, funds that are expected to be backed by less skilled investors show performance predictability and have a non-significant flow-performance relationship. These results suggest that only skilled investors use all available information to adjust their capital allocation and, as a result, eliminate performance predictability as argued theoretically by Berk and Green (2004). Results also show that Kaplan and Schoar (2005) overstate the persistence in fund performance by not using an ex ante measure of the performance of earlier funds. Whether or not an ex ante measure is used, however, the persistence is largely due to unsophisticated investors. When investors are sophisticated, the performance of earlier funds, sequence and fund size do not help predict the performance of the focal fund.     

Fair Value Accounting and Debt Contracting: Evidence from Adoption of SFAS 159

We examine how fair value accounting affects debt contract design, specifically the use and definition of financial covenants in private loan contracts. Using SFAS 159 adoption as our setting, we find that a small but significant proportion of loans (14.5%) modify covenant definitions to exclude the effects of SFAS 159 fair values. Only a limited number of these modifications exclude assets elected at fair value (less than 7%), while all exclude liabilities elected at fair value. Notably, we document that covenant definition modification is unassociated with ex ante fair value elections. We find that covenant definition modification positively varies with common incentive problems attributed to fair value accounting and negatively varies with benefits attributed to fair value accounting. Our results suggest that fair value accounting is not uniformly detrimental for debt contracting and fair value adjustments are included when they are most likely to improve performance measurement.     

When active fund managers deviate from their peers: Implications for fund performance

This paper proposes that the extent to which mutual fund managers’ beliefs deviate from the ex ante unobservable representative beliefs of their peers contains information about their skill. A new measure based on portfolio allocations, peer deviation, is used to capture a fund manager’s divergence from the contemporaneously unobservable beliefs of her peers. The portfolio based on representative beliefs of a group of managers investing in similar assets outperforms passive benchmarks, indicating that they reflect informed beliefs. Fund managers who simultaneously arrive at portfolio selections which, in hindsight, are close to those implied by representative beliefs possess ex ante more skill and exhibit future outperformance. Copycat strategies replicating lagged portfolio holdings implied by representative beliefs outperform the actual portfolio holdings of funds that deviate most, but the outperformance dissipates after two quarters.     

Do a firm's equity returns reflect the risk of its pension plan?

This paper examines the empirical question of whether systematic equity risk of US firms as measured by beta from the capital asset pricing model reflects the risk of their pension plans. There are a number of reasons to suspect that it might not. Chief among them is the opaque set of accounting rules used to report pension assets, liabilities, and expenses. Pension plan assets and liabilities are off-balance sheet and are often viewed as segregated from the rest of the firm, with its own trustees. Pension accounting rules are complicated. Furthermore, the role of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation clouds the real relation between pension plan risk and firm equity risk. The empirical findings in this paper are consistent with the hypothesis that equity risk does reflect the risk of the firm's pension plan despite arcane accounting rules for pensions. This finding is consistent with informational efficiency of the capital markets. It also has implications for corporate finance practice in the determination of the cost of capital for capital budgeting. Standard procedure uses de-leveraged equity return betas to infer the cost of capital for operating assets. But the de-leveraged betas are not adjusted for the risk of the pension assets and liabilities. Failure to make this adjustment typically biases upward estimates of the discount rate for capital budgeting. The magnitude of the bias is shown here to be large for a number of well-known US companies. This bias can result in positive net present value projects being rejected.     

Entrepreneurial finance: Banks versus venture capital

We analyze how entrepreneurial firms choose between two funding institution: banks, which monitor less intensively and face liquidity demands from their own investors, and venture capitalists, who can monitor more intensively but face a higher cost of capital because of the liquidity constraints that they impose on their own investors. Because the firm's manager prefers continuing the firm over liquidating it and aggressive (risky) continuation strategies over conservative (safe) continuation strategies, the institution must monitor the firm and exercise some control over its decisions. Bank finance takes the form of debt, whereas venture capital finance often resembles convertible debt. Venture capital finance is optimal only when the aggressive continuation strategy is not too profitable, ex ante; the uncertainty associated with the risky continuation strategy (strategic uncertainty) is high; and the firm's cash flow distribution is highly risky and positively skewed, with low probability of success, low liquidation value, and high returns if successful. A decrease in venture capitalists’ cost of capital encourages firms to switch from safe strategies and bank finance to riskier strategies and venture capital finance, increasing the average risk of firms in the economy.     

Reputational contagion and optimal regulatory forbearance

Existing studies suggest that systemic crises may arise because banks either hold correlated assets, or are connected by interbank lending. This paper shows that common regulation is also a conduit for interbank contagion. One bank's failure may undermine confidence in the banking regulator's competence, and, hence, in other banks chartered by the same regulator. As a result, depositors withdraw funds from otherwise unconnected banks. The optimal regulatory response to this behavior can be privately to exhibit forbearance to a failing bank. We show that regulatory transparency improves confidence ex ante but impedes regulators' ability to stem panics ex post.     

Asset financing with credit risk

This paper develops a model for the unified valuation of all forms of real asset financing, such as bank loans, leases, securitization vehicles, and credit guarantees, secured by assets that generate a stochastic service flow to the operator, or a rental stream to the lessor, and depreciate over a finite economic life to their scrap value. Examples include mobile equipment, such as aircraft, railroad equipment, ships, trucks and trailers, as well as energy generation assets, heavy factory equipment and construction equipment. In the event of obligor default, after a repossession delay and incurring costs of repossession, maintenance, re-marketing and re-deployment, the lender repossesses the asset and sells it on the secondary market and is, thus, subject to the risk of decline in the market value of the asset. The model we develop in this paper treats all forms of asset financing in a unified fashion as contingent claims on the collateral asset and the credit of the borrower. As an application, we estimate the collateral asset model on historical secondary market data for aircraft values and calibrate the financing model to the Enhanced Equipment Trust Certificates (EETCs) issued in 2007 by Continental Airlines and secured by a fleet of new aircraft. We then apply the calibrated model to value private market financing, including bank loans, leases, and credit guarantees, consistently with the capital market financing, and assess the impact of repossession delays on credit spreads. This analysis leads to a policy insight suggesting that bankruptcy laws limiting asset repossession delays lead to lower costs of asset financing.     

International capital market equilibrium with investment barriers

This paper outlines models of capital market equilibrium when there are explicit barriers to international investment in the form of a tax on holdings of assets in one country by residents of another country. There is a corresponding subsidy on short positions in foreign assets. Asset prices deviate from the predictions of the world capital asset pricing model. Investors do not hold a mixture of national market portfolios, but the mix of risky assets is the same for every investor in a country. Optimal portfolios tend to be heavy in domestic assets, and light in foreign assets. Tax free investors, however, tend to hold assets anywhere in the world that are taxed heavily. Estimates of the magnitude of the average tax (or the magnitude of effective barriers to international investment) can be made by comparing the average return on the minimum variance zero β portfolio, z, with the average across countries and time of the short-term interest rate. When barriers are ineffective, the expected return on portfolio z will be the average short-term interest rate, and the world capital asset pricing model will hold.     

DETERMINANTS OF CAPITAL STRUCTURE IN BUSINESS START‐UPS: THE ROLE OF NONFINANCIAL STAKEHOLDER RELATIONSHIP COSTS

According to the finance literature, nonfinancial stakeholders (NFS), such as customers, suppliers, and employees, take into account their expected liquidation costs when dealing with a firm. In this framework, firms can influence their probability of liquidation by choosing an appropriate capital structure. Also, the literature suggests NFS bargaining power may affect firm financing decisions. In the current article we investigate these ideas for initial financing decisions by business start‐ups, where ex ante failure risk is high and NFS must decide whether to make relationship‐specific investments. We find that start‐ups imposing larger costs on their NFS following liquidation significantly reduce leverage. This effect is strengthened when suppliers have greater bargaining power. We also document a marginally negative effect of NFS liquidation costs on the proportion of bank loans. Finally, business start‐ups rely less on bank loans when customers and suppliers are in a powerful bargaining position.     

Presidential Address: Collateral and Commitment

Optimal dynamic capital structure choice is fundamentally a problem of commitment. In a standard trade‐off setting with shareholder‐debtholder agency conflicts, full commitment counterfactually predicts the firm would rely almost exclusively on debt financing. Conversely, absent commitment a Modigliani‐Miller‐like value irrelevance and policy indeterminacy result holds. Thus, the content of dynamic trade‐off theory must depend on the commitment technology. In this context, collateral is valuable as a low‐cost commitment device. Because ex ante optimal commitments are likely to be suboptimal ex post, observed capital structure dynamics will exhibit hysteresis and depart significantly from standard predictions.     

Low-Risk Anomalies?

This paper shows that low-risk anomalies in the capital asset pricing model and in traditional factor models arise when investors require compensation for coskewness risk. Empirically, we find that option-implied ex ante skewness is strongly related to ex post residual coskewness, which allows us to construct coskewness factor-mimicking portfolios. Controlling for skewness renders the alphas of betting-against-beta and betting-against-volatility insignificant. We also show that the returns of beta- and volatility-sorted portfolios are driven largely by a single principal component, which in turn is explained largely by skewness.     

The Determinants of Corporate Trade Credit Policies in a Bank‐dominated Financial Environment: the Case of Finnish Small Firms

This paper examines trade credit policies of small firms operating in a bank‐dominated environment (Finland). We find that creditworthiness and access to capital markets are important determinants of trade credit extended by sellers. The level of purchases is positively correlated with the level of accounts payable. Larger and older firms and firms with strong internal financing are less likely to use trade credit, whereas firms with a high ratio of current assets to total assets, and firms subject to loan restructurings use it more. Negative loan decisions by financial intermediaries increase and a close bank‐borrower relationship decreases the probability that a firm does not take advantage of trade credit discounts.