Corporate Finance

We examine changes in banks' market-to-book ratios over the last decade, focusing on the dramatic and persistent declines witnessed during the financial crisis. The extent of the decline and its persistence cannot be explained by the delayed recognition of losses on existing financial instruments. Rather, it is declines in the values of intangibles — including customer relationships and other intangibles related to business opportunities — along with unrecognized contingent obligations that account for most of the persistent decline in market-to-book ratios.

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We provide conditions under which contingent claim and asset demands are consistent with state independent Expected Utility maximization. The paper focuses on the case of a single commodity and demands are allowed to be functions of probabilities and not just prices and income.

Following the classic work of Mitjuschin, Polterovich and Milleron, necessary and sufficient as well as sufficient conditions have been developed for when the multicommodity Law of Demand holds. However, far less attention has been focused on the nature and properties of violations. To address these questions, the existing sufficient conditions although simpler in form are of little value unless they are also necessary. We show when the widely cited Mitjuschin and Poterovich sufficient condition also becomes necessary.

Risk free asset demand in the classic portfolio problem is shown to decrease with income if and only if the consumer's uncertainty preferences over assets satisfy the preference condition that the risk free asset is more readily substituted for the risky asset as the quantity of the latter increases. In this case, the risky asset is said to be "urgently needed" following the terminology of the classic certainty analysis of Johnson (1913). The urgently needed property tends to be more readily satisfied in uncertainty versus certainty settings.

We analyze a model of optimal capital structure and liquidity choice based on a dynamic tradeoff theory for financially constrained firms. In addition to the classical tradeoff between the expected tax advantages of debt and bankruptcy costs, we introduce a cost of external financing for the firm, which generates a precautionary demand for liquidity and an optimal liquidity management policy for the firm.

This study examines the relation between securitization and loan performance using a comprehensive dataset from a major national mortgage lender. Loans remaining on the bank's balance sheet ex post incurred higher delinquency rates than sold loans, contrasting the negative relation between screening efforts and ex ante probability of loan sale explored by prior studies. Moreover, the performance gap between sold and retained loans was wider among the subsample of loans that were perceived as easier to resell.

Understanding country differences in temporal discounting is critical for extending incentive-based environmental policies successfully from developed countries to developing countries. We examined differences between Chinese and Americans in discounting of future financial and environmental gains and losses. In general, environmental use value was discounted significantly more than the monetary values, but environmental existence value was discounted similarly to the monetary values. Confirming previous research, we found that participants discounted gains significantly more than losses.

We present a model of the maturity of a bank's uninsured debt. The bank borrows funds and chooses afterwards the riskiness of its assets. This moral hazard problem leads to an excessive level of risk. Short-term debt may have a disciplining effect on the bank's risk-shifting incentives, but it may lead to inefficient liquidation. We characterize the conditions under which short-term and long-term debt are feasible, and show circumstances under which only short-term debt is feasible and under which short-term debt dominates long-term debt when both are feasible.