We show that the noninformation component of trading costs is priced in the cross-section of stock returns using intraday data for NYSE/AMEX stocks. More importantly, we show that the noninformation component is much larger and more strongly related to stock returns than is the adverse-selection component, indicating that the noninformation component plays a more important role in asset pricing than does the adverse-section component. We conduct a variety of robustness tests and show that our main results hold for different estimation methods, measures of the adverse-selection cost, subsample periods, and control variables. We offer plausible explanations for these results.

The efficacy of the Financial Stability Board's proposed requirement for minimum “total loss absorbing capacity” (TLAC) at global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) is assessed using a stylized model of a bank holding company and an equilibrium asset pricing model to value financial claims. I identify a number of G-SIB strategies that satisfy minimum TLAC requirements but fail to reduce implicit safety net subsidies that accrue to G-SIB shareholders or increase the resources available to recapitalize a failing G-SIB subsidiary. To meet the FSB's stated goals, TLAC requirements must impose minimum TLAC at all subsidiaries and restrict how TLAC funds can be invested. An equivalent, but much simpler solution is to significantly increase regulatory capital requirements on systemically important bank subsidiaries.

This article analyzes the relationship between consumer bankruptcy patterns and the destruction of soft information caused by mergers. Using a major Canadian bank merger as a source of exogenous variation in local banking conditions, we show that local markets affected by the merger exhibit an increase in consumer bankruptcy rates post-merger. The evidence is consistent with the most plausible mechanism being the disruption of consumer–bank relationships. Markets affected by the merger show a decrease in the merging institutions’ branch presence and market share, including those stemming from higher switching rates. We rule out alternative mechanisms such as changes in quantity of credit, loan rates, or observable borrower characteristics.

Robert H. Nelson has been a member of the economics staff of the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior since 1975. He thanks Christopher Leman for his particular helpfulness over many years in identifying literature on American government and for comments and criticisms from the viewpoint of a political scientist on several drafts of this article. In addition, Donald Bieniewicz, Robert Crandall, Robert Davis, Herbert Fullerton, Jon Goldstein, Joan Hartmann, Ted Heintz, Evan Kwerel, Larry Lane, Ross Marcou, John Schefter, Eugene Steuerle, Richard Stroup, Richard Wahl, and Jeffrey Wasserman-all past or presentfirst-hand observers of the policy-making process-read earlier drafts and made helpful comments.

We treat rising inequality as an equilibrium outcome in which human capital investment fails to keep pace with rising demand for skills. Investment affects skill supply and prices on three margins: the type of human capital in which to invest, how much to acquire, and the intensity of use. The latter two represent the intensive margins of human capital acquisition and utilization. These choices are substitutes for the creation of new skilled workers, yet they are complementary with each other, magnifying inequality. When skill-biased technical change drives economic growth, greater inequality reduces growth.

When a firm writes incomplete debt contracts, its limited ability to commit to not strategically default and renegotiate its debt requires the firm to pay higher yields to its creditors. Hedged by credit derivatives, creditors have stronger bargaining power in the case of debt renegotiation, which ex-ante demotivates the firm to default strategically. In this paper, I aim to investigate theoretically and empirically whether credit derivatives could help reduce the cost of debt contracting stemming from the possibility of strategic default. I find that firms with a priori high strategic default incentives experience a relatively large reduction in their corporate bond spreads after the introduction of credit default swaps (CDS) written on their debt. This result is robust to controlling for the endogeneity of CDS introduction. My finding is consistent with the presence of CDS reducing the strategic default-related cost of corporate debt, suggesting the beneficial role of credit derivatives as a commitment device for the borrower to repay the lender.

The recent financial crisis has prompted much new research on the interconnectedness of the modern financial system and the extent to which it contributes to systemic fragility. Network connections diversify firms' risk exposures, but they also create channels through which shocks can spread by contagion. We review the extensive literature on this issue, with the focus on how network structure interacts with other key variables such as leverage, size, common exposures, and short-term funding. We discuss various metrics that have been proposed for evaluating the susceptibility of the system to contagion and suggest directions for future research.

We study the effects of regulatory interventions and capital support (bailouts) on banks’ liquidity creation. We rely on instrumental variables to deal with possible endogeneity concerns. Our key findings, which are based on a unique supervisory German dataset, are that regulatory interventions robustly trigger decreases in liquidity creation, while capital support does not affect liquidity creation. Additional results include the effects of these actions on different components of liquidity creation, lending, and risk taking. Our findings provide new and important insights into the debates about the design of regulatory interventions and bailouts.

Firms have increasingly adopted open work environments. Although openness is thought to have benefits, it could also expose firms to an unanticipated cost. An open (closed) internal reporting environment makes it more (less) likely that managers will observe a colleague's communications with senior executives. This increase in what one manager knows about another manager's communication to senior executives could facilitate employee collusion to extract resources from the firm. To test whether internal reporting openness results in more collusion, we conduct an experiment in which two managers each make separate reports to the firm about cost information they know in common but that remains unknown by the firm. Because both managers face the same truth‐inducing contract, conventional economic theory predicts that they will not collude to misreport costs regardless of reporting openness. However, using behavioral theory involving trust and reciprocity, we predict and find that managers honor their nonbinding collusive agreements and successfully collude more often in an open versus closed internal reporting environment, leading to lower firm welfare in the open environment. These results suggest that firms should consider how the cost of collusion compares to the benefits of openness.

The Home Affordable Modification Program's (HAMP's) Principal Reduction Alternative (PRA) is a government-sponsored program to reduce the principal balances and monthly mortgage payments of troubled borrowers. We examine the effect of principal forgiveness on borrowers' subsequent mortgage default. The program's rules imply a kink in the relationship between principal forgiveness and a borrower's initial equity level. Our identification strategy exploits the quasi-experimental variation in principal forgiveness generated by this kink using a regression kink design (RKD), which compares the relationship between initial equity and default on either side of the kink. We estimate that HAMP PRA reduced the quarterly default hazard from 3.8% to 3.1%.