In a competitive product market, firms that buy their input have lower profit volatility than they would have if they were to make it. This effect on profit volatility is an important consideration in the firms’ capital structure choices and their make or buy decisions when it interacts with the risk-taking incentive of equityholders of levered firms. Even with a cost advantage enjoyed by a supplier and passed on to its customers, in an industry equilibrium of a priori identical firms, only those that use little or no debt outsource their input to the supplier; all significantly debt-financed firms produce their own input and take advantage of the greater profit volatility resulting from internal production.

The risk‐sensitive pricing of deposit insurance and the discount window is determined in an environment where banks have private information concerning their financial conditions. The two facilities are managed jointly; an incentive‐compatible policy is designed such that banks' choice of terms at which they can obtain insurance and access to discount window credit will reveal their asset quality. The function of the discount window is to be a risk‐neutral “lender of last resort” to banks in a market dominated by risk‐averse depositors.

In a credit market characterized by a priori asymmetric information, collateral not only can identify credit applicants but also can result in moral hazard involving the borrower's use of pledged assets. The borrower's other alternatives are to apply for unsecured bank credit and be priced as “average, ” or to acquire financing by selling an asset and subsequently renting it for continued use. The optimal secured loan contract for higher quality firms is shown to involve overcollateralization. There is underinvestment relative to first best in maintenance of the pledged assets but overinvestment relative to the level that would be chosen without bank monitoring. Self-financing and unsecured credit are chosen by the intermediate and lowest quality groups, respectively.

[We characterize a credit market equilibrium in which banks coexist with capital markets and firms obtain funding from both sources. An incentive problem exists between the firm's insiders and outside providers of capital. Banks can provide not only credit but also monitoring services. We show that when banks cannot precommit to a particular level of monitoring, there is a unique credit market equilibrium with firms being financed with a combination of bank credit and external capital. In this equilibrium, a marginal substitution of bank credit for capital market financing would raise the firm's stock price.]

This paper studies distinctions between fixed-price and Dutch auction self-tenders for common stock. We find that fixed-price tenders pay higher premiums to retire greater equity fractions than Dutch offers yet generate similar total returns to stockholders. Accordingly, total returns are significantly higher in Dutch auctions after controlling for tender and firm characteristics. In addition, wealth transfers to owners of repurchased shares are significantly higher in fixed-price offers. The Dutch mechanism thus appears to induce increases in firm value with smaller disbursals of cash. These cost savings to investors who maintain their ownership may explain the popularity of the new technique.

Informational scope economies provide a cost advantage to universal banks offering “one‐stop shopping” for lending and underwriting that enables them to “lock in” their clients' subsequent business. This market power reduces universal banks' incentive, relative to that of specialized investment banks, to apply costly underwriting efforts; consequently, universal banks are less successful in selling their clients' securities. Our results suggest that an integrated financial services market is less innovative than one with specialized intermediaries. Our analysis also identifies economy, intermediary, and firm characteristics that motivate either the integration or segmentation of bank lending and underwriting.