We propose a tractable framework to examine the role of intermediary capital in the allocation and pricing of credit. In our model, regulated financial intermediaries compete with unregulated investors, targeting distributions of heterogeneous borrowers. We derive a sufficient statistic that characterizes intermediaries’ cross-sectional lending decisions and provide a novel intermediary asset pricing equation that accounts for the endogenous segmentation of marginal investors across securities. These formulae reveal the central role of intermediaries’ shadow cost of capital in both credit allocation and pricing. Our results can concurrently rationalize a broad array of empirical facts documented in the context of credit markets. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance. Funding: This work was supported by Marcus och Amalia Wallenbergs minnesfond [Grant 2021.0122].

Our paper analyzes whether a planner should design a taxonomy for sustainable investment products when conventional tools for environmental regulation can also be used to address externalities arising from firm production. We first show that the private market provision of ESG funds marketed to retail investors involves greenwashing, so that a mandatory taxonomy is necessary to generate real effects of sustainable finance. However, the introduction of such a taxonomy can only improve welfare, on top of optimally chosen environmental regulation, if financial frictions constrain socially valuable economic activity. Otherwise, environmental policy alone is sufficient to optimally address externalities.

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We analyze the effects of a reform of capital regulation for U.S. insurance companies in 2009. The reform eliminates capital buffers against unexpected losses associated with portfolio holdings of MBS, but not for other fixed-income assets. After the reform, insurance companies are much more likely to retain downgraded MBS compared to other downgraded assets. This pattern is more pronounced for financially constrained insurers. Exploiting discontinuities in the reform’s implementation, we can identify the relevance of the capital requirements channel. We also document that the insurance industry crowds outs other investors in the new issuance of (high-yield) MBS.

We study the effects of green capital requirements that give preferential capital treatment to clean loans. From a positive perspective, our analysis clarifies the differential effects of green supporting and brown penalizing factors. From a normative perspective, we contrast optimal capital requirements under a classic prudential mandate, which is affected by carbon emissions only through climate-related risks to the banking sector, with those under a broader green mandate that accounts for more general carbon externalities. While climate-related risks that affect bank stability can be optimally addressed by a combination of green supporting and brown penalizing factors, capital regulation is a less effective tool to address carbon externalities that manifest itself outside of the banking sector.

ABSTRACTWe analyze the effects of regulatory interference in compensation contracts, focusing on recent mandatory deferral and clawback requirements restricting incentive compensation of material risk‐takers in the financial sector. Moderate deferral requirements have a robustly positive effect on risk‐management effort only if the bank manager's outside option is sufficiently high; otherwise, their effectiveness depends on the dynamics of information arrival. Stringent deferral requirements unambiguously backfire. Our normative analysis characterizes whether and how deferral and clawback requirements should supplement capital regulation as part of the optimal policy mix.

Agencies around the world are in the process of developing taxonomies and standards for sustainable (or ESG) investment products. A key assumption in our model is that of non-consequentialist private investors (households) who derive a "warm glow" decisional utility when purchasing an investment product that is labelled as sustainable. We ask when such labelling is socially beneficial even when the socialplanner can impose a minimum standard on investment and production. In a model of financial constraints (Holmström and Tirole 1997), which we close to include consumer surplus, we also determine the optimal labelling threshold and show how its stringency is affected by determinants such as the prevalence of warm-glow investor preferences, the presence of social network effects, or the relevance of financial constraints at the industry level.

We study the effects of green capital requirements that give preferential capital treatment to clean loans. From a positive perspective, our analysis clarifies the differential effects of green supporting and brown penalizing factors. From a normative perspective, we contrast optimal capital requirements under a classic prudential mandate, which is affected by carbon emissions only through climaterelated risks to the banking sector, with those under a broader green mandate that accounts for more general carbon externalities. While climate-related risks that affect bank stability can be optimally addressed by a combination of green supporting and brown penalizing factors, capital regulation is a less effective tool to address carbon externalities that manifest itself outside of the banking sector.

This article characterizes optimal compensation contracts in principal-agent settings in which the consequences of the agent's action are only observed over time. The optimal timing of pay trades off the costs of deferred compensation arising from the agent's relative impatience and potential consumption smoothing needs against the benefit of exploiting additional informative signals. By capturing this information benefit of deferral in terms of the likelihood ratio dynamics, our characterization covers general signal processes in a unified setting. With bilateral risk neutrality and agent limited liability, optimal contracts are high-powered and stipulate at most two payout dates. If the agent is additionally risk-averse, payouts are contingent on performance exceeding a hurdle that is increasing over time. We obtain clear-cut predictions on how the duration of optimal compensation depends on the nature of information arrival as well as agent characteristics and derive implications for the maturity structure of securities in financial contracting settings.

We propose a novel conceptual approach to transparently characterizing credit market outcomes in economies with multi-dimensional borrower heterogeneity. Based on characterizations of securities' implicit demand for bank equity capital, we obtain closed-form expressions for the composition of credit, including a sufficient statistic for the provision of bank loans, and a novel cross-sectional asset pricing relation for securities held by regulated levered institutions. Our framework sheds light on the compositional shifts in credit prior to the 07/08 financial crisis and the European debt crisis, and can provide guidance on the allocative effects of shocks affecting both banks and the cross-sectional distribution of borrowers.

This paper proposes an indirect tax approach to derive positive and normative implications of regulatory interference in compensation contracts, focusing on recent mandatory deferral and clawback requirements in the financial sector. Moderate deferral requirements for bonus-pay typically lead to lower bank failure rates by inducing shareholders to incentivize more risk management effort from their managers, whereas stringent deferral requirements achieve the opposite. Additional clawback requirements prevent such backfiring only when competition for managerial talent is high. We characterize the optimal calibration of deferral and clawback requirements depending on the information environment, managers' outside options and their interaction with capital regulation.

We characterize the conditions under which a socially responsible (SR) fund induces firms to reduce externalities, even when profit-seeking capital is in perfectly elastic supply. Such impact requires that the SR fund’s mandate permits the fund to trade off financial performance against reductions in social costs—relative to the counterfactual in which the fund does not invest in a given firm. Based on such an impact mandate, we derive the social profitability index, an investment criterion that characterizes the optimal ranking of impact investments when SR capital is scarce. If firms face binding financial constraints, the optimal way to achieve impact is by enabling a scale increase for clean production. In this case, SR and profit-seeking capital are complementary: Surplus is higher when both investor types are present.

This paper analyzes the effects of mandatory deferral and clawback requirements for managerial compensation contracts in the financial sector. Moderate deferral requirements for bonus payouts induce bank shareholders to incentivize more risk management effort from the manager (and, hence, lower bank failure rates), whereas stringent deferral requirements will lead to higher risk of bank failure. Additional clawback requirements may prevent such backfiring if and only if competition for managerial talent is sufficiently high. We provide conditions for when the optimal mix of capital and compensation regulation can achieve secondbest welfare. Our analysis exploits the general idea that any (regulatory) restriction on compensation design can be understood as an indirect Pigouvian tax levied on the principal for incentivizing a given action.

My research analyzes strategic interactions between firms, regulators, and governments. Both the methodological as well as the topical aspects are important in linking the various pieces of my research together. In the topics dimension, my research interests have shifted from an international emphasis to the role of financial regulation. Methodologically, I have extensively studied dynamic relationships and contracts, in particular the trade-off between short-term interests and the long-run cost of short-sighted behavior.

Cash- and stock-financed takeover bids induce strikingly different target revaluations. We exploit detailed data on unsuccessful takeover bids between 1980 and 2008, and we show that targets of cash offers are revalued on average by +15% after deal failure, whereas stock targets return to their pre-announcement levels. The differences in revaluation do not revert over longer horizons. We find no evidence that future takeover activities or operational changes explain these differences. While the targets of failed cash and stock offers are both more likely to be acquired over the following eight years than matched control firms, no differences exist between cash and stock targets, either in the timing or in the value of future offers. Similarly, we cannot detect differential operational policies following the failed bid. Our results are most consistent with cash bids revealing prior undervaluation of the target. We reconcile our findings with the opposite conclusion in earlier literature (Bradley, Desai, and Kim, 1983) by identifying a look-ahead bias built into their sample construction.

Our paper develops a simple principal-agent framework to analyze the equilibrium relationship between risk-taking and the timing of pay. In our setup, the agent's one-time action has persistent effects through affecting the arrival time distribution of a disaster event. While the principal receives informative signals about the agent's action over time, it is costly to rely on this information for incentive pay since the agent is relatively impatient. Optimal compensation contracts resolve the tension between impatience and information with at most two payout dates. Our framework lends itself to analyze recent regulatory interventions mandating minimum deferral periods and clawback provisions in the financial sector. It shows how such regulatory interference in the timing dimension causes the principal to adjust other dimensions of the compensation contract, which may then lead to higher risk-taking. Mandatory deferral requirements are more likely to be effective in reducing risk-taking when competition for agents is high.

We propose a tractable framework to examine the system-wide effects of bank capital requirements. In our model, banks can serve a socially beneficial role by financing firms that are credit rationed by public markets, but banks' access to deposit insurance (and implicit debt guarantees) creates socially undesirable risk-shifting incentives. Equity ratio requirements reduce banks' risk-taking incentives, but may also constrain banks' balance sheets. When existing bank capital is sufficiently high, increases in equity-ratio requirements unambiguously improve welfare and the stability of the banking system. However, when bank capital is scarce, increased equity-ratio requirements induce credit rationing of both bank-dependent firms with positive NPV projects and risky firms with negative NPV. In this case, the net effects on welfare and the risk-taking of banks are ambiguous, as they depend on which type of credit rationing dominates. Our model provides conceptual guidance on the cyclicality of optimum capital requirements as well as their dependence on the development of public markets and the cross-sectional distribution of firms.

Based on a large sample of withdrawn mergers over a time period from 1979 until 2003, we examine the informational content revealed to the market by a merger attempt. Using event study methodology, we find that firms that receive a cash offer have a significantly positive price reaction that persists even after the withdrawal of the merger. In contrast, firms that are targets of a stock-financed takeover attempt lose all the abnormal positive return they received at the announcement of the merger once the merger is withdrawn. After controlling for several potential explanations, we find that the financing choice of the bidder significantly affects the overall stock return to the target over the period from announcement to withdrawal. Our findings are consistent with an asymmetric information model, where the bidder has private information about the target that is revealed to the market through the financing choice. This paper is subsumed by the paper: "Target Revaluation after Failed Takeover Attempts Cash versus Stock" joint with Ulrike Malmendier and Farzad Saidi. See http://ssrn.com/abstract=1785942.

This paper studies the dynamics of long-term contracts in repeated principal-agent relationships with an impatient agent. Despite the absence of exogenous uncertainty, Pareto-optimal dynamic contracts generically oscillate between favoring the principal and favoring the agent.