This paper tests a new hypothesis that bank managers issue public debt, at least in part, to convey positive, private information and refrain from issuance to hide negative, private information. This “positive selection” hypothesis is tested against the traditional “adverse selection” hypothesis. We find evidence for “positive selection,” using ratings migrations, equity returns, bond issuance, and balance sheet data for US bank holding companies. The results add to our understanding of “market discipline” in monitoring bank holding companies and also inform upon how proposed regulatory requirements that banking organizations frequently issue public debt might augment “market discipline.”

ABSTRACT This paper documents “runs” on asset‐backed commercial paper (ABCP) programs in 2007. We find that one‐third of programs experienced a run within weeks of the onset of the ABCP crisis and that runs, as well as yields and maturities for new issues, were related to program‐level and macro‐financial risks. These findings are consistent with the asymmetric information framework used to explain banking panics, have implications for commercial paper investors’ degree of risk intolerance, and inform empirical predictions of recent papers on dynamic coordination failures.