[We address a fundamental question in relationship banking: why do banks that make relationship loans finance themselves primarily with core deposits and when would it be optimal to finance such loans with purchased money? We show that not only are relationship loans informationally opaque and illiquid, but they also require the relationship between the bank and the borrower to endure in order for the bank to add value. However, the informational opacity of relationship loans gives rise to endogenous withdrawal risk that makes the bank fragile. Core deposits are an attractive funding source for such loans because the bank provides liquidity services to core depositors and this diminishes the likelihood of premature deposit withdrawal, thereby facilitating the continuity of relationship loans. That is, we show that banks will wish to match the highest value-added liabilities with the highest value-added loans and that doing so simultaneously minimizes the bank's fragility owing to withdrawal risk and maximizes the value the bank adds in relationship lending. We also examine the impact of interbank competition on the bank's asset-liability matching and extract numerous testable predictions.]

[While standard contract theory suggests that a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) should be paid relative to a benchmark that removes the effects of sector performance, there is evidence that CEO pay is strongly and positively related to such sector performance. In this article, we offer an explanation. We model a CEO charged with selecting the firm's strategy that determines the firm's exposure to sector performance. To incentivize the CEO to choose optimally, pay contracts will be positively and sometimes asymmetrically related to sector performance. Consistent with our predictions, the empirical analysis indicates that the observed sensitivity of pay to sector performance is almost fully confined to multisegment firms and is greater in firms that offer greater strategic flexibility to alter sector exposure, for more talented CEOs and for CEOs as compared to their subordinate executives. Our evidence is robust to alternate explanations such as CEO entrenchment.]

In a dynamic setting, high-quality firms may tolerate current adverse selection when raising financing because they expect future opportunities to profitably acquire assets from failed lower-quality firms. But search frictions in asset trading impede efficiency, inviting government intervention. Anticipation of such intervention affects ex ante adverse selection and project investment because it reduces buyers’ ex post trading profits. Depending on parameter values, this anticipation can have either pernicious or salutary effects. The pernicious effect reduces participation by high-quality firms, worsens adverse selection, and depresses project investment, potentially triggering investment-enhancing government assistance (an “intervention trap”). The salutary effect mitigates adverse selection and increases project investment.

We model optimal ethical standards, capital requirements and talent allocation in banking. Banks with varying safety-net protections, including depositories and shadow banks, innovate products and compete for talent. Managers dislike unethical behavior, but banks heed it only because detection imposes costs. We find: (i) higher capital induces higher ethical standards, but socially optimal capital requirements may tolerate some unethical behavior; (ii) managerial ethics fails to raise banks’ ethical standards; (iii) banks with lower ethical standards attract better talent and innovate more; and (iv) it is socially optimal to allocate better talent to shadow banks instead of depositories, and this allocation results in higher capital requirements and ethical standards for depositories. Consequently, with capital capacity constraints, the shadow banking sector is larger than the depository sector; talent competition induces a race to the bottom in ethical standards, and the regulator responds by setting capital requirements to magnify this size difference.

We develop a model in which bank culture improves upon outcomes attainable with incentive contracting. The bank designs a second-best incentive contract to induce the desired managerial effort allocation across growth and safety, but this induces excessive growth relative to the first best, a distortion exacerbated by interbank competition. Bank culture has two effects: it matches managers to banks with similar beliefs, and a safety-oriented culture reduces the competition-induced excessive growth focus. Culture is also contagious – a safety-oriented culture in some banks causes others to follow suit – this effect strengthens with higher bank capital and weakens with stronger safety nets.

We address a fundamental question in relationship banking: why do banks that make relationship loans finance themselves primarily with core deposits and when would it be optimal to finance such loans with purchased money? We show that not only are relationship loans informationally opaque and illiquid, but they also require the relationship between the bank and the borrower to endure in order for the bank to add value. However, the informational opacity of relationship loans gives rise to endogenous withdrawal risk that makes the bank fragile. Core deposits are an attractive funding source for such loans because the bank provides liquidity services to core depositors and this diminishes the likelihood of premature deposit withdrawal, thereby facilitating the continuity of relationship loans. That is, we show that banks will wish to match the highest value-added liabilities with the highest value-added loans and that doing so simultaneously minimizes the bank's fragility owing to withdrawal risk and maximizes the value the bank adds in relationship lending. We also examine the impact of interbank competition on the bank's asset-liability matching and extract numerous testable predictions.

We develop a model in which there are firms and employees who care about profit-sacrificing higher purpose (HP) and those who do not. Firms and employees search for each other in the labor market. Each firm chooses its HP investment. When there is no social pressure on firms to adopt a purpose, HP dissipates agency frictions, lowers wage costs, yet elicits higher employee effort in firms that intrinsically value the purpose. However, social pressure to invest in HP can distort the HP investments of all firms and reduce welfare by making all agents worse off. Applications of these results to banking are discussed.

This paper develops a theory in which housing prices, the capital structures of banks (mortgage lenders) and the capital structures of mortgage borrowers are all endogenously determined in equilibrium. There are four main results. First, leverage is a “positively correlated” phenomenon in that high leverage among borrowers is positively correlated with high leverage among banks, and higher house prices lead to higher leverage for both. The intuition is that first-time homebuyers with fixed wealth endowments must borrow more to buy more expensive homes, whereas higher current house prices rationally imply higher expected future house prices and therefore higher collateral values on bank loans, inducing banks to be more highly levered. Second, higher bank leverage leads to greater house price volatility in response to shocks to fundamental house values. Third, a bank’s exposure to credit risk depends not only on its own leverage but also on the leverage decisions of other banks. Fourth, positive fundamental shocks to house prices dilute financial intermediation by reducing banks’ pre-lending screening, and this reduction in bank screening further increases house prices. Empirical and policy implications of the analysis are drawn out, and empirical evidence is provided for the first two main results. The key policy implications are that greater geographic diversification by banks, tying mortgage tax exemptions to the duration of home ownership, and increasing bank capital requirements when borrower leverage is high can help reduce house price volatility.

We examine corporate governance effectiveness when the CEO generates project ideas and the board of directors screens these ideas for approval. However, the precision of the board's screening information is controlled by the CEO. Moreover, both the CEO and the board have career concerns that interact. The board's career concerns cause it to distort its investment recommendation procyclically, whereas the CEO's career concerns cause her to sometimes reduce the precision of the board's information. Moreover, the CEO sometimes prefers a less able board, and this happens only during economic upturns, suggesting that corporate governance will be weaker during economic upturns.

We examine whether a firm’s debt maturity structure affects its credit quality. Consistent with theory, we find that firms with greater exposure to rollover risk (measured by the amount of long-term debt payable within a year relative to assets) have lower credit quality; long-term bonds issued by those firms trade at higher yield spreads, indicating that bond market investors are cognizant of rollover risk arising from a firm’s debt maturity structure. These effects are stronger among firms with a speculative-grade rating and declining profitability, and during recessions.