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.

Cheng and Neamtiu examine whether credit rating agencies exploit market power to sell a substandard product. Their evidence is suggestive, but plausible alternative hypotheses could explain their results. Johnston, Markov and Ramnath provide first evidence on the bond and firm characteristics that determine the quantity of sell-side debt analyst coverage that a corporate bond receives. They also find that debt analysts anticipate credit rating changes and add information to markets incremental to credit ratings, suggesting debt analysts will be important to future research on bond markets. These results also suggest a method for refining tests of rating agency market power.

I study external debt issued by operating subsidiaries of diversified firms. Consistent with Kahn and Winton's [2004. Moral hazard and optimal subsidiary structure for financial institutions. Journal of Finance 59, 2537–2575] model, where subsidiary debt mitigates asset substitution, I find firms are more likely to use subsidiary debt when their divisions vary more in risk. Consistent with subsidiary debt mitigating the free cash flow problem, I find that subsidiaries are more likely to have their own external debt when they have fewer growth options and higher cash flow than the rest of the firm. Finally, I find that subsidiary debt mitigates the “corporate socialism” and “poaching” problems modeled in theories of internal capital markets.

Little evidence exists on whether boards help managers make better decisions. We provide evidence that strong and independent boards help overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) avoid honest mistakes when they seek to acquire other companies. In addition, we find that once-overconfident CEOs make better acquisition decisions after they experience personal stock trading losses, providing evidence that a manager’s recent personal experience, and not just educational and early career experience, influences firm investment policy. Finally, we develop and validate a new CEO overconfidence measure that is easily constructed from machine-readable insider trading data, unlike previously used measures.

We find evidence that conflicts of interest arising from mergers and acquisitions (M&A) relations influence analysts' recommendations, corroborating regulators' and practitioners' suspicions in a setting, i.e., M&A relations, not previously examined in research on analyst conflicts. In addition, the M&A context allows us to disentangle the conflict of interest effect from selection bias. We find that analysts affiliated with acquirer advisors upgrade acquirer stocks around M&A deals, even around all-cash deals, in which selection bias is unlikely. Also consistent with conflict of interest but not selection bias, target-affiliated analysts publish optimistic reports about acquirers after, but not before, the exchange ratio of an all-stock deal is set.

Prominent policy makers assert that managerial short-termism was at the root of the subprime crisis of 2007–2009. Prior scholarly research, however, largely rejects this assertion. Using a more comprehensive measure of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) incentives for short-termism, we uncover evidence that short-termism indeed played a role. Firms whose CEOs were contractually allowed to sell or exercise more of their stock and options holdings sooner had more subprime exposure, a higher probability of financial distress, and lower risk-adjusted stock returns during the crisis, as well as higher fines and settlements for subprime-related fraud.

Using unique data from 12 lenders, we examine how equity lending fees respond to demand shocks. We find that, when demand is moderate, fees are largely insensitive to demand shocks. However, at high demand levels, further increases in demand lead to significantly higher fees and the extent to which demand shocks impact fees is also related to search frictions in the loan market. Moreover, consistent with search models, we find significant dispersion in loan fees, with this dispersion increasing in loan scarcity and search frictions. Our findings imply that search frictions significantly impact short selling costs.