I analyze efficient government interventions to mitigate financial distress during a severe macroeconomic downturn. At the macroeconomic level, the key variable is the gap between the real wage and the shadow cost of labor. This gap is large when unemployment is high. At the micro level, laissez-faire leads to excessive liquidation of businesses but an indiscriminate bailout prevents efficient reallocations and implies a large transfer from taxpayers to existing private creditors. I show that a cost-efficient intervention can be achieved with a continuation premium, whereby the government agrees to reduce its claims by the same haircut as private creditors plus a fixed premium. (JEL D24, G33, G38, H12) Received November 17, 2020; editorial decision November 23, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul.

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again after 1980; (ii) most of these variations can be explained by corresponding changes in the quantity of intermediated assets (equity, household and corporate debt, liquidity); (iii) intermediation has constant returns to scale and an annual cost of 1.5–2 percent of intermediated assets; (iv) secular changes in the characteristics of firms and households are quantitatively important. (JEL D24, E44, G21, G32, N22)

[We argue that earnings management and fraudulent accounting have important economic consequences. In a model where the costs of earnings management are endogenous, we show that in equilibrium, low-productivity firms hire and invest too much in order to pool with high productivity firms. This behavior distorts the allocation of economic resources in the economy. We test the predictions of the model using firm-level data. We show that during periods of suspicious accounting, firms hire and invest excessively, while managers exercise options. When the misreporting is detected, firms shed labor and capital and productivity improves. Our firm-level results hold both before and after the market crash of 2000. In the aggregate, our model provides a novel explanation for periods of jobless and investment-less growth.]

We study time-consistent bank resolution mechanisms. The key constraint is that governments cannot avoid bailouts that are ex post efficient. Contrary to common wisdom, we show that the government may still avoid moral hazard and implement the first-best allocation by using the distribution of bailouts across banks to provide incentives. We analyze properties of credible tournament mechanisms that provide support to the best-performing banks and resolve the worst-performing ones. We extend our mechanism and show that it continues to perform well when banks are imperfect substitutes, when they are differentially interconnected as long as bailout funds can be earmarked, and when their risk-taking is driven by overoptimism instead of moral hazard.

We provide a comprehensive account of the dynamics of eurozone countries from 2000 to 2012. We analyze private leverage, fiscal policy, labor costs, and spreads, and we propose a model and an identification strategy to separate the impact of credit cycles, excessive government spending, and sudden stops. We then ask how periphery countries would have fared with different policies. We find that countries could have stabilized their employment if they had followed more conservative fiscal policies during the boom. Macroprudential policies and an early intervention by the central bank to prevent market segmentation and reduce fiscal austerity would also have significantly reduced the recession. (JEL E24, E32, E58, E62, F33, F42, H61)

We study the design of interventions to stabilize financial markets plagued by adverse selection. Our contribution is to analyze the information revealed by participation decisions. Taking part in a government program carries a stigma, and outside options are mechanism dependent. We show that the efficiency of an intervention can be assessed by its impact on the market interest rate. The presence of an outside market determines the nature of optimal interventions and the choice of financial instruments (debt guarantees in our model), but it does not affect implementation costs. (JEL D82, D86, G01, G20, G31)

ABSTRACT We analyze government interventions to recapitalize a banking sector that restricts lending to firms because of debt overhang. We find that the efficient recapitalization program injects capital against preferred stock plus warrants and conditions implementation on sufficient bank participation. Preferred stock plus warrants reduces opportunistic participation by banks that do not require recapitalization, although conditional implementation limits free riding by banks that benefit from lower credit risk because of other banks’ participation. Efficient recapitalization is profitable if the benefits of lower aggregate credit risk exceed the cost of implicit transfers to bank debt holders.

We analyze trading speed and fragmentation in asset markets. In our model, trading venues make technological investments and compete for investors who choose where and how much to trade. Faster venues charge higher fees and attract speed-sensitive investors. Competition among venues increases investor participation, trading volume, and allocative e ffi ciency, but entry and fragmentation can be excessive, and speeds are generically ine ffi cient. Regulations that protect transaction prices (e.g., Securities and Exchange Commission trade-through rule) lead to greater fragmentation. Our model sheds light on the experience of European and U.S. markets since the implementation of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and Regulation National Markets System.

I propose an implementation of the q-theory of investment using bond prices instead of equity prices. Credit risk makes corporate bond prices sensitive to future asset values, and q can be inferred from bond prices. With aggregate U.S. data, the bond market's q fits the investment equation six times better than the usual measure of q, it drives out cash flows, and it reduces the implied adjustment costs by more than an order of magnitude. Theoretical interpretations for these results are discussed. (c) 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..