While market prices can be useful tools for bank regulation, recent theoretical work argues that reliance on prices can be counterproductive when secondary markets are stressed and illiquid. Evidence from the financial crisis unearthed by Bhat et al. (in press) provides empirical validation of these arguments. Though Bhat et al. do not fully acknowledge it, their findings suggest that forcing banks to count liquidity-induced unrealized losses in securities holdings against regulatory capital destroys value and exposes bank creditors, including taxpayers, to more risk. Policy makers contemplating greater regulatory reliance on market prices ignore these findings at their peril.

This article tests whether stock market investors appropriately distinguish between new and old information about firms. I define the staleness of a news story as its textual similarity to the previous ten stories about the same firm. I find that firms' stock returns respond less to stale news. Even so, a firm's return on the day of stale news negatively predicts its return in the following week. Individual investors trade more aggressively on news when news is stale. The subsequent return reversal is significantly larger in stocks with above-average individual investor trading activity. These results are consistent with the idea that individual investors overreact to stale information, leading to temporary movements in firms' stock prices. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

[This article tests whether stock market investors appropriately distinguish between new and old information about firms. I define the staleness of a news story as its textual similarity to the previous ten stories about the same firm. I find that firms' stock returns respond less to stale news. Even so, a firm's return on the day of stale news negatively predicts its return in the following week. Individual investors trade more aggressively on news when news is stale. The subsequent return reversal is significantly larger in stocks with above-average individual investor trading activity. These results are consistent with the idea that individual investors overreact to stale information, leading to temporary movements in firms' stock prices.]

[We use loan-level data from the New York City metropolitan area to examine the extent to which lenders attempted to prevent foreclosures with concessionary modifications during the Great Depression. We find no principal forgiveness in the sample and only a handful of concessionary mortgage modifications of other types. Far more mortgages terminated through foreclosure than received any sort of concessionary modification. The results indicate that there are significant impediments to renegotiation of residential mortgages beyond securitization. As such, less renegotiation seems unlikely to be a major cost of securitization of residential mortgages.]

Following the dividend flexibility hypothesis used by DeAngelo and DeAngelo (2006), Blau and Fuller (2008), and others, we theoretically extend the proposition of DeAngelo and DeAngelo (2006) optimal payout policy in terms of the flexibility dividend hypothesis. In addition, we also introduce growth rate, systematic risk, and total risk variables into the theoretical model. To test the theoretical results derived in this paper, we use the data collected in the US from 1969 to 2009 to investigate the impact of the growth rate, systematic risk, and total risk on the optimal payout ratio in terms of the fixed-effect model. We find that based on flexibility considerations, a company will reduce its payout when the growth rate increases. In addition, we find that a nonlinear relationship exists between the payout ratio and the risk. In other words, the relationship between the payout ratio and the risk is negative (or positive) when the growth rate is higher (or lower) than the rate of return on total assets. Our theoretical model and empirical results can therefore be used to identify whether flexibility or the free cash flow hypothesis should be used to determine the dividend policy.

[The massive losses that banks incurred with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market have raised concerns about their ability to continue lending to corporations. We investigate these concerns. We find that firms paid higher loan spreads during the subprime crisis. Importantly, the increase in loan spreads was higher for firms that borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses. These results hold after we control for firm-, bank-, and loan-specific factors, and account for endogeneity of bank losses. These findings, together with our evidence that borrowers took out smaller loans during the crisis when they borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses, lend support to the concerns about bank lending following their subprime losses.]

How can we know in advance whether simplifying assumptions about beliefs will make a difference in the conclusions of game-theoretic models? We define critical types to be types whose rationalizable correspondence is sensitive to assumptions about arbitrarily high-order beliefs. We show that a type is critical if and only if it exhibits common belief in some non-trivial event. We use this characterization to show that all types in commonly used type spaces are critical. On the other hand, we show that regular types (types that are not critical) are generic, although perhaps inconvenient to use in applications.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the choice between adopting a monetary base or an interest rate setting instrument to maintain financial stability. Our results suggest that the interest rate instrument is preferable, since during times of a panic or financial crisis the Central Bank automatically satisfies the increased demand for money. Thus, it prevents sharp losses in asset values and enhanced asset volatility.

Abstract Analysis of daily reported incidents of major crimes in twelve U.S. cities reveals an increase in crime over the course of monthly welfare payment cycles. This increase reflects an increase in crimes that are likely to have a direct financial motivation as opposed to other kinds of crime. Temporal patterns in crime are observed in jurisdictions in which disbursements are focused at the beginning of monthly welfare payment cycles and not in jurisdictions in which disbursements are relatively more staggered. These findings indicate that welfare beneficiaries consume welfare-related income quickly and then attempt to supplement it with criminal income.