Knowledge that Transforms

This paper studies bank learning through repeated interactions with borrowers from a new perspective. To understand learning by lending, we adapt a methodology from labor economics to analyze how loan contract terms evolve as banks acquire new information about borrowers. We construct “proxy” variables for this information using data from borrowers’ out-of-sample, future credit performance. Due to the timing of their construction, banks could not have used these variables directly to price loans. We nonetheless find that these proxies increasingly predict loan prices as relationships progress, even after controlling for possible omitted variable bias. Our methodology provides strong evidence that: (a) bank learning affects loan prices, and (b) relationship benefits are heterogeneous. In particular, higher quality borrowers face differentially lower spreads as their relationship with lenders develop – and banks learn about their quality – while lower quality borrowers see loan prices increase and their loan amounts fall. We further find suggestive evidence that banks incorporate CEO-specific information into loan prices.

In this paper, we identify several shortcomings in the systemic-risk scoring methodology currently used to identify and regulate Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs). Using newly-disclosed regulatory data for 119 US and international banks, we show that the current scoring methodology severely distorts the allocation of regulatory capital among banks. We then propose and implement a methodology that corrects for these shortcomings and increases incentives for banks to reduce their risk contributions.

We examine the empirical relation between labor unions and firm indebtedness in the contemporary United States. Our identification strategy exploits two negative exogenous shocks in union power and the threat of unionization. Further, in the context of panel regressions, we develop a novel firm-level proxy for the bargaining power of labor using collective bargaining information from mandatory IRS filings from 1999 to 2013. Across a battery of tests, we document evidence in favor of a crowding-out hypothesis — namely, a substitution effect between labor power and financial leverage. Notably, this effect is more pronounced in firms in labor-intensive and unionized industries.

We develop a model in which bank culture improves upon outcomes attainable with incentive contracting. The bank designs a second-best incentive contract to induce the desired managerial effort allocation across growth and safety, but this induces excessive growth relative to the first best, a distortion exacerbated by interbank competition. Bank culture has two effects: it matches managers to banks with similar beliefs, and a safety-oriented culture reduces the competition-induced excessive growth focus. Culture is also contagious – a safety-oriented culture in some banks causes others to follow suit – this effect strengthens with higher bank capital and weakens with stronger safety nets.

Intermediation chains represent a common pattern of trade in over-the-counter markets. We study a classic problem impeding trade in these markets: an agent uses his market power to inefficiently screen a privately informed counterparty. We show that, generically, if efficient trade is implementable via any incentive-compatible mechanism, it is also implementable via a trading network that takes the form of a sufficiently long intermediation chain. We characterize information sets of intermediaries that ensure this striking result. Sparse trading networks featuring long intermediation chains might thus constitute an efficient market response to frictions, in which case no regulatory action is warranted.

This paper investigates whether the institutional affiliation of a collateralized loan obligation (CLO) manager influences the manager's access to information and risk appetite. We find that CLO managers affiliated with banks start to sell off their positions in loans arranged by their bank well before the onset of default. In contrast, CLO managers affiliated with nonbanks do not lower their exposures to distressed loans. These findings are consistent with bank-affiliated CLO managers being more risk averse, but they could also derive from them having access to valuable information. On close inspection, we find that although bank-affiliated CLO managers are averse to holding any distressed loans, they are also more aggressive at divesting distressed loans arranged by their parent bank, suggesting that they benefit from an information wedge. Besides helping us understand CLO managers’ trading activities, our findings highlight a potential limit to banks’ ability to originate loans and distribute them via their affiliated CLOs.

We develop a model of financial intermediation wherein bank managers “reach for yield” – by overinvesting in risky assets and underinvesting in safer assets – provided they do not face much cost from liquidity shortfalls. The managers follow a pecking order in which their first preference is to invest in risky assets; their second preference is to hoard liquid assets; and their last preference is to invest in safer assets. This behavior is conducive to the formation of bubbles and “negative” bubbles in the market for risky and safer assets, respectively. Monetary loosening, by reducing the cost of liquidity shortfalls, induces further reach for yield and amplifies the bubbles.

In this paper, we analyse the restructuring of debt in the presence of debt overhang. The firm starts out with a debt liability and an investment opportunity. Then with unrestructured debt, the firm maintains the current borrowing payments until default or investment. If the creditors allow the parties to restructure the debt with exchange offers, then the borrowing payments change as well as the default and investment points. We find that there is a unique optimal restructuring path which maintains debt at positive levels but defers default indefinitely. This path is optimal regardless of whether the debt holders or the firm control the process through superior bargaining power. Moreover, a debt-for-equity exchange to remove all existing debt takes place just before investment that is followed by the issue of an optimal amount of new debt as part of the funding for the investment cost. The optimal investment trigger is higher along the optimal restructuring path than it is for an unlevered firm. We discuss the findings in the light of existing empirical evidence.