The paper presents a new theory of trade credit in which firms buy inputs on credit from suppliers to restore the benefits of secured bank financing impaired by contract incompleteness. In a setting where investment is endogenous and unobservable to financiers, we show that a bank-secured credit contract is time-inconsistent. Upon being granted credit, the entrepreneur has an incentive to alter the original input combination, jeopardizing the bank’s revenues. Anticipating the entrepreneur’s opportunism, the bank offers an unsecured credit contract, reducing the surplus from the venture. One way for the entrepreneur to commit to the contract terms is to purchase inputs on credit from the supplier. The supplier observes the input investment and acts as a guarantor that inputs will be purchased as contracted, thus facilitating access to secured bank financing. The commitment role of trade credit still holds in a multi-period extension that investigates the impact of bank relationship lending on secured debt and trade credit. Our model provides novel testable predictions on optimal financial contracts in both one-period and repeated lending relationships.

We model an anxious agent as one who is more risk averse with respect to imminent risks than with respect to distant risks. Based on a utility function that captures individual subjects’ behavior in experiments, we provide a tractable theory relaxing the restriction of constant risk aversion across horizons and show that it generates rich implications. We first apply the model to insurance markets and explain the high premia for short-horizon insurance. Then, we show that costly delegated portfolio management, investment advice, and withdrawal fees emerge as endogenous features and strategies to cope with dynamic inconsistency in intratemporal risk-return trade-offs.

We provide evidence that some profitable insider stock selling is motivated by public information. At firms that disclose having concentrated sales relationships, insiders appear to sell their own stock profitably based on public information about their principal customers. Supplier insiders also sell more stock when public information about their customers׳ recent returns and earnings surprises suggests they will earn larger profits. These results are stronger when outside investor attention could be lower. Outside of this setting, insiders engage in a higher proportion of routine sales and their sales are less profitable. We do not find similar patterns for insider purchases.

We examine how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation increased at a subset of firms in response to a governance shock that affected compensation levels at other firms in the economy. We first show that Delaware-incorporated firms with staggered boards and no outside blockholders increased CEO compensation following the mid-1990s Delaware legal cases that strengthened their ability to resist hostile takeovers. Consistent with the Gabaix and Landier (2008) contagion hypothesis, non-Delaware firms subsequently increased CEO compensation when the rulings affected a substantial number of firms in their industries. We further show how these legal developments contributed significantly to the rapid increase in CEO compensation in the late 1990s.

This paper examines the impact of financial deregulation on entrepreneurship. We assess the impact of credit card deregulation on transitions into self-employment using state-level removal of credit card interest rate ceilings following the US Supreme Court's 1978 Marquette decision as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that credit card deregulation increases the probability of entrepreneurial entry, with a particularly strong effect for black entrepreneurs. We demonstrate that these effects are magnified in states with a history of racial discrimination and link the results to discrimination-based barriers to entry.

We test the predictability of investment fraud using a panel of mandatory disclosures filed with the SEC. We find that disclosures related to past regulatory and legal violations, conflicts of interest, and monitoring have significant power to predict fraud. Avoiding the 5% of firms with the highest ex ante predicted fraud risk would allow an investor to avoid 29% of fraud cases and over 40% of the total dollar losses from fraud. We find no evidence that investors receive compensation for fraud risk through superior performance or lower fees. We examine the barriers to implementing fraud prediction models and suggest changes to the SEC's data access policies that could benefit investors.

Assuming that firms’ suppliers are better able to extract value from the liquidation of assets in default and have an information advantage over other creditors, the paper derives six predictions on the use of trade credit. (1) Financially unconstrained firms (with unused bank credit lines) take trade credit to exploit the supplier's liquidation advantage. (2) If inputs purchased on account are sufficiently liquid, the reliance on trade credit does not depend on credit rationing. (3) Firms buying goods make more purchases on account than those buying services, while suppliers of services offer more trade credit than those of standardized goods. (4) Suppliers lend inputs to their customers but not cash. (5) Greater reliance on trade credit is associated with more intensive use of tangible inputs. (6) Better creditor protection decreases both the use of trade credit and input tangibility.

Prior theoretical research has found that, in the absence of regulation, a greater number of insiders leads to more insider trading. We show that optimal regulation features detection and punishment policies that become stricter as the number of insiders increases, reducing insider trading in equilibrium. We construct measures of the likelihood of insider activity prior to bid announcements of private-equity buyouts during the period 2000–2006 and relate these to the number of financing participants. Suspicious stock and options activity is associated with more equity participants, while suspicious bond and CDS activity is associated with more debt participants — consistent with models of limited competition among insiders but inconsistent with our model of optimal regulation.

Theory suggests that banks’ private information lets them hold up borrowers for higher interest rates. Since new information about a firm is revealed at the time of its bond IPO, it follows that banks will be forced to adjust their loan interest rates downwards after firms undertake their bond IPO. We test this hypothesis and find that firms are able to borrow at lower interest rates after their bond IPO. Importantly, firms that get their first credit rating at the time of their bond IPO benefit from larger interest rate savings than those that already had a credit rating. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that banks price their informational monopoly. We also find that it is costly for firms to enter the public bond market.

Acquisitions among New York Stock Exchange specialist firms can increase specialist firm size, capitalization, and market concentration, and thereby affect the market quality of the stocks they trade. We find that while traded stocks show significant improvement in several market quality measures following acquisitions, similar changes are evident in matched control stocks not involved in acquisitions. We conclude that specialist firm acquisitions either do not improve market quality, or improve market quality, but competitive and other pressures (resulting partly from the acquisitions themselves) force improvements in market quality for control stocks also. Either interpretation implies that specialist acquisitions have not had deleterious effects on market quality.