In this paper, we examine how the value of failed bank assets differs between two types of FDIC resolution methods: liquidation and private-sector reorganization. Our findings show that private-sector reorganizations do not deliver the expected cost-savings from 1986 to 1991, a period of industry distress. On a univariate basis, the net loss on assets is lower for a private-sector reorganization than for a liquidation in both a period of industry distress and of industry health. However, institutions with higher quality assets and higher franchise values are more likely to be resolved using a private-sector resolution. Once we control for this selection bias, we find that institutions that are resolved during periods of industry distress result in higher resolution costs than liquidation. During periods of industry health, private-sector resolutions are less costly than liquidations. We show that if a bank that failed during the post-crisis period instead failed during the crisis period, its net loss as a percent of assets would have been 3.232 percentage points higher. Given that the average net loss on assets ratio is 21.42 percent during our sample period from 1986 to 2007, the increase in costs is economically significant.

We investigate the effect of political connections in Italy, for each level of government, on the credit markets and we find robust evidence that politically connected firms benefit from lower interest rates when the political link is at a local level. Our results show that this preferential treatment is stronger when connected firms borrow from banks with politicians on their boards and when the degree of autonomy granted to local loan officers is higher. The latter result provides a novel addition to the literature on the effects of the delegation of lending decisions within the bank. We also show that the effect is stronger in geographical areas where the incidence of corruption is higher. Overall, our results show that on aggregate the impact of political connections on interest rates is limited but it may rise significantly in specific (local) situations due to a combination of factors such as the delegation of lending decisions, a weaker rule of law and some governance characteristics of banks.

We analyze the impact of the introduction of the French Tobin tax on the turnover and measures of the liquidity and volatility of the affected stocks with nonparametric tests on individual stocks, difference-in-difference tests and other robustness checks controlling for simultaneous month-of-the-year and size effects. Our findings indicate that the tax produces a significant reduction in turnover and volatility (measured in terms of stock price volatility and the high–low price range) and inconclusive effects on liquidity when the latter is evaluated under the two dimensions of the estimated bid–ask spread and the Amihud (2002) price impact ratio.

We develop a decentralized Bayesian model of college admissions with two ranked colleges, heterogeneous students, and two realistic match frictions: students find it costly to apply to college, and college evaluations of their applications are uncertain. Students thus face a portfolio choice problem in their application decision, while colleges choose admissions standards that act like market-clearing prices. Enrollment at each college is affected by the standards at the other college through student portfolio reallocation. In equilibrium, student-college sorting may fail: weaker students sometimes apply more aggressively, and the weaker college might impose higher standards. Applying our framework, we analyse affirmative action, showing how it induces minority applicants to construct their application portfolios as if they were majority students of higher caliber.

We model the risk of setting the required fixed-offer price in an IPO given initial uncertainty about value, as well as costs of over and underpricing. Assuming that the goal of issuers in bookbuilt IPOs is to maximize net offering proceeds, our analysis indicates that their optimal strategy is to negotiate a relatively small spread, consistent with material underpricing. Similarly, considering the expected costs of overpricing makes the underpricing of best-efforts IPOs in the interest of issuers. Our results rely on neither asymmetric information nor agency costs and provide support for Hansen's (2001) nearly-optimal “conventional” spread and the view that it evolved from adaptive, imitative behavior, consistent with Alchian's (1950) explanation of how economic players evolve practices to survive under uncertainty and incomplete information, as well as Alchian's (1969) work on how fixed prices and queues can efficiently clear product markets.

Firms spend substantial resources on marketing and selling. Interpreting this as evidence of frictions in product markets, which require firms to spend resources on customer acquisition, this article develops a search theoretic model of firm dynamics in frictional product markets. Introducing search frictions generates long-term customer relationships, rendering the customer base a state variable for firms, which is sluggish to adjust. This affects: the level and volatility of firm investment, profits, value, sales and markups, the timing of firm responses to shocks, and the relationship between investment and Tobin's q. We document support for these predictions in firm-level data from Compustat, using cross-industry variation in selling expenses to quantify differences in the degree of friction across markets.

Using a strategic rational expectations equilibrium framework, we show that forcing a well-informed insider to disclose her trades in advance tends to increase welfare for both the insider and less-informed outsiders. Advance disclosure generates price risk for the insider, and to mitigate this risk, the insider trades less aggressively on her private information. Consequently, outsiders face lower adverse selection costs, which improves risk sharing and increases welfare. The drop in trading aggressiveness also causes market efficiency to decline. Furthermore, pretrade disclosure encourages excessive risk taking but may either encourage or discourage managerial effort.

A wide body of empirical evidence finds that around 25 percent of fiscal stimulus payments (e.g., tax rebates) are spent on nondurable household consumption in the quarter that they are received.To interpret this fact, we develop a structural economic model where households can hold two assets: a low-return liquid asset (e.g., cash, checking account) and a high-return illiquid asset that carries a transaction cost (e.g., housing, retirement account).The optimal life-cycle pattern of portfolio choice implies that many households in the model are "wealthy hand-to-mouth": they hold little or no liquid wealth despite owning sizeable quantities of illiquid assets.They therefore display large propensities to consume out of additional transitory income, and small propensities to consume out of news about future income.We document the existence of such households in data from the Survey of Consumer Finances.A version of the model parameterized to the 2001 tax rebate episode yields consumption responses to fiscal stimulus payments that are in line with the evidence, and an order of magnitude larger than in the standard "one-asset" framework.The model's nonlinearities with respect to the size of the rebate, its degree of phasing-out, and aggregate economic conditions have implications for policy design.

We find that bond price quotes impound bad earnings news on a more timely basis than good earnings news and that the bond market impounds bad news on a more timely basis than the stock market. We also find that the timeliness of the bond market reaction to bad news is concentrated primarily among speculative‐grade bonds, consistent with earnings news having a larger effect on bond price quotes when default risk is high. In addition, we find that a portion of the bad news impounded by the bond market reverses following the earnings announcement. Overall, our findings are consistent with bondholders’ asymmetric payoff function having important implications for the valuation role of accounting information in the bond market. Specifically, our findings indicate that bond quotes impound bad earnings news much earlier in the pre‐earnings announcement period than stock prices. In addition, bondholders appear to overreact to the bad earnings news initially and correct this overreaction subsequent to the earnings announcement.