We study the interaction between relationship banking and short-term arm’s length activities of banks, called trading. We show that a bank can use the franchise value of its relationships to expand the scale of trading, but may allocate too much capital to trading ex post, compromising its ability to build relationships ex ante. This effect is reinforced when trading is used for risk shifting. Overall, combining relationship banking and trading offers benefits under small-scale trading, but distortions may dominate when trading is unbridled. This suggests that trading by banks, while benign historically, might be distortive with deeper financial markets.

Does Europe offer lessons for the consolidation in US banking? In this paper, it is argued that the political dimension in Europe has led to the protection of national flagships and consolidation mainly on a national scale. Lessons for the US are limited. Rather, the regional expansion observed in US banking may offer valuable lessons for imminent cross-border mergers in European banking.

In this article, we provide a novel rationale for credit ratings. The rationale that we propose is that credit ratings serve as a coordinating mechanism in situations where multiple equilibria can obtain. We show that credit ratings provide a "focal point" for firms and their investors, and explore the vital, but previously overlooked implicit contractual relationship between a credit rating agency (CRA) and a firm through its credit watch procedures. Credit ratings can help fix the desired equilibrium and as such play an economically meaningful role. Our model provides several empirical predictions and insights regarding the expected price impact of rating changes.

The authors explain why an issuer may wish to raise external capital by selling multiple financial claims that partition its total asset cash flows, rather than a single claim. They show that, in an asymmetric information environment, the issuer's expected revenue is enhanced by such cash flow partitioning because it makes informed trade more profitable. This approach seems capable of shedding light on corporate incentives to issue debt and equity, as well as on financial intermediaries' incentives to issue multiple classes of claims against portfolios of securitized assets.

ABSTRACT We study the divestiture decisions of managers who care about their reputations. Managers' divestiture and investment decisions are publicly observable, but managers privately observe signals with respect to the future payoff distribution of investments they have initiated. We establish that in equilibrium there is too little divestiture. These inefficiencies create the opportunity for wealth‐enhancing divestiture‐motivated takeovers. A key result is that only managers of targets with “middle of the road” asset specificity should consider the takeover threat credible. These findings suggest that uniqueness of assets is an important determinant of both agency costs and takeover activity. Our analysis leads to several empirical predictions.

We explain the use of legally unenforceable, discretionary financial contracts in circumstances where legally enforceable contracts are feasible. A discretionary contract allows a contracting party to choose whether or not to honor the contract. It is shown that such a contract liquefies reputational capital by permitting it to be depreciated in exchange for the preservation of financial capital and information reusability in financially impaired states. In addition, discretionary contracts foster the development of reputation. This explains discretion among highly confident letters, holding-company relationships, mutual-fund contracts, bank loan commitments, and other financial and nonfinancial contracts.

We examine the design of control rights of external financiers, and how these interact with the firm's security issuance and capital structure when the firm's initial owners and managers may disagree with new investors over project choice. The first main result is an ex ante managerial preference for “soft” financial claims that maximize managerial project-choice autonomy, which is in contrast to agency theory. Second, a dynamic “pecking order” of cash, equity, and debt emerges. Additional results explain equity issuance at high prices, the drifting of leverage ratios with stock returns, cash hoarding, and debt usage without taxes, agency, or signaling.

In this article we ask: what kind of information and how much of it should firms voluntarily disclose? Three types of disclosures are considered. One is information that complements the information available only to informed investors (to-be-processed complementary information). The second is information that is orthogonal to that which any investor can acquire and thus complements the information available to all investors (preprocessed complementary information). And the third is information that substitutes for the information of the informed investors in that it reveals to all what was previously known only by the informed (substitute information). Our main results are as follows. First, in equilibrium, all types of firms voluntarily disclose all three types of information. Second, in contrast to the existing literature, complementary information disclosure by firms strengthens investors’ private incentives to acquire information. Substitute information disclosure weakens private information acquisition incentives. Third, while complementary information disclosure has an ambiguous effect on financial innovation incentives, substitute information disclosure weakens those incentives.