This paper provides an in-depth study of the allocation of a firm's residual risks not explicitly managed through interlocking contracts in the context of project finance. Focusing on the Ras Gas project, we relate its credit spreads as a measure of investor risk perceptions to firm-specific risk factors in the context of 25-year supply agreements, debt covenants, and a debt-service guarantee contingent on output prices. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that unmanaged risk factors affecting the supply agreement drive Ras Gas’ credit spreads, whereas managed ones have no effect. Interpreting our findings as evidence for the nexus-of-contracts view of the firm, we discuss some implications for financial design and valuation.

We consider an imperfectly competitive loan market in which a local relationship lender has an information advantage vis-à-vis distant transaction lenders. Competitive pressure from the transaction lenders prevents the local lender from extracting the full surplus from projects. As a result, the local lender inefficiently rejects marginally profitable projects. Collateral mitigates the inefficiency by increasing the local lender's payoff from precisely those marginally profitable projects that she inefficiently rejects. The model predicts that, controlling for observable borrower risk, collateralized loans are more likely to default ex post, which is consistent with the empirical evidence. The model also predicts that borrowers for whom local lenders have a relatively smaller information advantage face higher collateral requirements, and that technological innovations that narrow the information advantage of local lenders, such as small business credit scoring, lead to a greater use of collateral in lending relationships.

In this paper we use a new method to rank finance journals and study the pattern of authorship/co-authorship across journals. Defined as the ratio of articles authored by faculty at the world's top 80 finance programs to the total number of articles by all authors, the Author Affiliation Index is a cost-effective and intuitively easy-to-understand approach to journal rankings. Forty-one finance journals are ranked according to this index. If properly constructed, the Author Affiliation Index provides an easy and credible way to supplement the existing journal ranking methods. Our ranking system reveals the journal–researcher clientele, and we find that collaboration (co-authoring) between faculty within elite programs exists only in top-tier and near-top-tier journals. Publications in lower-tier journals by researchers of elite programs are driven by their co-authors. Collaboration between faculty in elite and non-elite programs, however, is more prevalent than that within elite programs across all tiers of journals. Co-authorship among top 80 programs, nevertheless, is more common in top-tier journals, while co-authorship between top 80 and other programs is more dominant in lower-ranked journals.

[This article reports the results of an experiment designed to assess the impact of lastsale trade reporting on the liquidity of BBB corporate bonds. Overall, adding transparency has either a neutral or a positive effect on liquidity. Increased trans is not associated with greater trading volume. Except for very large trades, spreads on newly transparent bonds decline relative to bonds that experience no transparency change. However, we find no effect on spreads for very infrequently traded bonds. The observed decrease in transaction costs is consistent with investors' ability to negotiate better terms of trade once they have access to broader bond-pricing data.]

This paper takes steps toward integrating firm theory in the spirit of Alchian and Demsetz (1972) and Grossman and Hart (1986), contract theory in the spirit of Holmstrom (1979), and general equilibrium theory in the spirit of Arrow and Debreu (1954) and McKenzie (1959). In the model presented here, the set of firms that form and the contractual arrangements that appear, the assignments of agents to firms, the prices faced by firms for inputs and outputs, and the incentives to agents are all determined endogenously at equilibrium. Agents choose consumption—but they also choose which firms to join, which roles to occupy in those firms, and which actions to take in those roles. Agents interact anonymously with the (large) market, but strategically within the (small) firms they join. The model accommodates moral hazard, adverse selection, signaling, and insurance. Equilibria may be Pareto ranked.

This paper develops and tests a model of how country characteristics, such as legal protections for minority investors and the level of economic and financial development, influence firms’ costs and benefits in implementing measures to improve their own governance and transparency. We find that country characteristics explain much more of the variance in governance ratings (ranging from 39% to 73%) than observable firm characteristics (ranging from 4% to 22%). Further, we show that firm characteristics explain almost none of the variation in governance ratings in less-developed countries and that access to global capital markets sharpens firms’ incentives for better governance.

We examine a sample of 459 firms filing for Chapter 11 during the period 1991–1998 and find that our sample firms experience significant improvements in their operating performance during Chapter 11. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Chapter 11, if anything, provides net benefits to bankrupt firms. In the cross section, firms with higher debt ratios experience greater improvements in operating performance, and the complexity of the renegotiation process negatively affects the improvement. We find no relationship between Chapter 11 outcome and changes in risk-adjusted firm value in Chapter 11.

This paper contributes to the literature that analyzes the mechanisms linking financial shocks and real activity. In particular, we investigate the growth impact of banking crises on industries with different levels of dependence on external finance. If banks are the key institutions allowing credit constraints to be relaxed, then a sudden loss of these intermediaries in a system in which such intermediaries are important should have a disproportionately contractionary impact on the sectors that flourished due to their reliance on banks. Using data from 38 developed and developing countries that experienced financial crises during the last quarter century, we find that those sectors that are highly dependent on external finance tend to experience a substantially greater contraction of value added during a banking crisis in countries with deeper financial systems than in countries with shallower financial systems. Our results do not suggest, however, that on net the externally dependent firms fare worse in deep financial systems.

We examine the effects of analysts' celebrity on investor reaction to earnings forecast revisions. We measure celebrity as the quantity of media coverage analysts receive in sources included in the Dow Jones Interactive database, and find that media coverage is positively related to investor reaction to forecast revisions. The effect of celebrity on the reaction to forecast revisions remains significant after controlling for forecast performance variables examined in prior studies (ex post forecast accuracy, ex ante accuracy, award status, and other variables shown to be related to forecast accuracy). While these results are consistent with the familiarity of the analyst's name affecting the market reaction, we cannot rule out that our measure of celebrity is correlated with error in the performance measures we examine and/or correlated with other unexamined dimensions of forecast performance. A content analysis of a random subsample of the media coverage of our sample analysts suggests that our findings likely are not due to the increased availability of forecast revisions. Finally, an investigation of the excess returns around the quarterly earnings announcement date suggests that market participants react too strongly to forecast revisions issued by analysts with high levels of media coverage. Taken together, these findings suggest that an analyst's level of media coverage can affect the initial market reaction to his forecast revisions.