Knowledge that Transforms

This paper characterizes the optimal securities for venture capital finance in an environment with multiple investment stages and double-sided moral hazard in the relationship between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. We show that if the conditions relevant for continuation into later stages are verifiable, the optimal security gives the venture capitalist a constant share in the success return of the project over a predetermined set of continuation states. Otherwise, the parties sign an initial start-up contract that is later renegotiated. In this case, in order to minimize the incentive distortions associated with the burden of early financing stages, the optimal start-up security gives a zero payoff in low profitability states and thereafter an increasing share in the success return of the project.

This paper provides a first study of the optimal design of active monitors' exit options in a problem involving a demand for liquidity and costly monitoring of the issuer. Optimal incentives to monitor the issuer may involve restricting the monitor's right to sell her claims on the firm's cash-flow early. But the monitor will then require a liquidity premium for holding such an illiquid claim. In general, therefore, there will be a trade off between incentives and liquidity. The paper highlights a fundamental complementarity between speculative monitoring in financial markets (which increases the informativeness of prices) and active monitoring inside the firm: in financial markets where price discovery is better and securities prices reflect the fundamentals of the issuer better, the incentive cost of greater liquidity may be smaller and active monitoring incentives may be preserved. The paper spells out the conditions under which more or less liquidity is warranted and applies the analysis to shed light on common exit provisions in venture capital financing.

We provide a general framework for analyzing the effects of insider trading on real investment and welfare as well as the consequences of different regulatory policies in a model where all traders are rational expected-utility maximizers and aware of their position in the market. We find that: with costly information acquisition, an “abstain-or-disclose” rule tends to be optimal; with free information acquisition, laissez-faire is better. This suggests enforcing an abstain-or-disclose rule with a high standard of proof for inside information. Our approach also uncovers the pitfalls of welfare analysis in the noise-trader model.

This study analyzes the risk-taking behavior of mutual funds in response to their relative performance over the 1992 to 1999 period. Our results show that managers of funds whose performance is closer to that of the top performing funds have greater incentives to increase their portfolios' risk than managers at the top who exhibit a tendency to lock in their positions. The evidence suggests that termination risk imposes a constraint on the risk taking behavior of underperforming fund managers and the winner takes all phenomenon generates a strong incentive for the fund managers to be the top manager. We also analyze the difference in the risk taking behavior of funds managed by multiple managers and single managers.

We present a continuous-time asset pricing model of the levered firm where shareholders select not only the timing but also the form of abandonment. Shareholders can walk out of the firm either by (i) defaulting on their debt obligations or (ii) selling their shares to alternative operators of, the technologies, as in a corporation sale . The structural model relates shareholders' ex-post choice to both technological and financial factors. Considering that operators' technological supremacy is not universal, we obtain that whereas default necessarily involves an inefficient timing of ownership transfer, corporation sales do not. Then, the likelihood of default being chosen instead of a corporation sale increases with (i) the degree of leverage displayed by the firm and (ii) its technological supremacy. By ignoring corporation sales, existing defaultable bond pricing models have thus a tendency to exaggerate risk premia and underestimate the borrowing ability (debt capacity) of firms.

This paper provides a survey of existing literature on portfolio allocations in conventional and tax-deferred investment habitats. A long-standing puzzle in this literature has been the dissonance between the theoretical prediction of tax-efficient portfolio choices and observed portfolio allocations. I clarify this prediction and offer a different perspective by emphasizing the importance of uninsurable labor income risk and restrictions on accessibility of tax-deferred assets. I identify the key factors in dual-habitat portfolio decisions and highlight the necessary ingredients for producing non-tax-efficient, or precautionary, allocations.

This paper explains the rationale behind deposit collateral that has not been discussed in the literature on financial contracting. In our model extending Hart and Moore (1998) to account for liquidity shocks, deposit collateral has potentially two important effects: the enhancement of pledgeability and the provision of liquidity. We show that only if liquidity shocks are stochastic, both effects are significant and overall efficiency is improved. This improvement is the raison d'être of deposit collateral. The result also establishes a unique role for banks, since deposit collateral can only be taken by these financial institutions. Furthermore, it is shown that the collateral can be implemented in the form of compensating balance requirements with or without commitment loans and is attached with less restrictive efficiency conditions than alternative lending arrangements.

Robert Z. Aliber, Bhagwan Chowdhry, Shu Yan; Some Evidence that a Tobin Tax on Foreign Exchange Transactions May Increase Volatility *, European Finance Re