While the too-big-to-fail guarantee is explicitly a part of bank regulation in many countries, this paper shows that bank closure policies also suffer from an implicit “too-many-to-fail” problem: when the number of bank failures is large, the regulator finds it ex-post optimal to bail out some or all failed banks, whereas when the number of bank failures is small, failed banks can be acquired by the surviving banks. This gives banks incentives to herd and increases the risk that many banks may fail together. The ex-post optimal regulation may thus be time-inconsistent or sub-optimal from an ex-ante standpoint. In contrast to the too-big-to-fail problem which mainly affects large banks, we show that the too-many-to-fail problem affects small banks more by giving them stronger incentives to herd.

[This article uses managerial control rights data for over 5000 firms from 31 countries to examine the net costs and benefits of cash holdings. We find that when external country-level shareholder protection is weak, firm values are lower when controlling managers hold more cash. Further, when external shareholder protection is weak we find that firm values are higher when controlling managers pay dividends. Only when external shareholder protection is strong do we find that cash held by controlling managers is unrelated to firm value, consistent with generally prevailing U.S. and international evidence.]

[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 propose a simple method to help researchers develop quantitative models of economic fluctuations. The method rests on the insight that many models are equivalent to a prototype growth model with time-varying wedges that resemble productivity, labor and investment taxes, and government consumption. Wedges that correspond to these variables—efficiency, labor, investment, and government consumption wedges—are measured and then fed back into the model so as to assess the fraction of various fluctuations they account for. Applying this method to U.S. data for the Great Depression and the 1982 recession reveals that the efficiency and labor wedges together account for essentially all of the fluctuations; the investment wedge plays a decidedly tertiary role, and the government consumption wedge plays none. Analyses of the entire postwar period and alternative model specifications support these results. Models with frictions manifested primarily as investment wedges are thus not promising for the study of U.S. business cycles.

[In certain circumstances, insider trades such as private transactions between executives and their firms could be disclosed after the end of the firm's fiscal year, on a Form-5 filing. We find that insider sales disclosed in such a delayed manner for large firms are predictive of negative future returns (-6 to -8 percent), as well as lower future annual earnings relative to analyst forecasts. These results stand in contrast to existing findings on the uninformativeness of quickly disclosed open-market insider sales. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act curtailed the use of Form 5 under the presumption that managers used this vehicle opportunistically. Our systematic evidence supports this presumption.]

In the US, open-market repurchases have a non-standard structure, lack formal procedures and there is low degree of transparency. Hence, in order to fully capture the signalling incentives of buy-backs in more general context, we examine the Australian environment where there a distinct announcement of, substantial information release during, as well as a transparent process throughout, the buy-back event. Our study finds strong incentives for on-market buy-backs related to: (i) signalling of undervaluation, (ii) signalling to reduce agency costs and/or information asymmetry, as well as (iii) a means to utilise excess debt capacity. Our most significant result is that signalling incentives, in the context of the more transparent Australian buy-back environment, are substantially greater relative to comparable existing US evidence. Accordingly, changing the US repurchase requirements to a format similar to that which now exists in Australia would encourage the release of more timely, relevant information and so improve the signalling incentives for, and consequently the power of, the US repurchase mechanism.

Insider trading in the credit derivatives market has become a significant concern for regulators and participants. This paper attempts to quantify the problem. Using news reflected in the stock market as a benchmark for public information, we find significant incremental information revelation in the credit default swap market under circumstances consistent with the use of non-public information by informed banks. The information revelation occurs only for negative credit news and for entities that subsequently experience adverse shocks, and increases with the number of a firm's relationship banks. We find no evidence, however, that the degree of asymmetric information adversely affects prices or liquidity in either the equity or credit markets.

We show theoretically that while cash allows financially constrained firms to hedge future investment against income shortfalls, reducing current debt is a more effective way to boost investment in future high cash flow states. Thus, constrained firms prefer higher cash to lower debt if their hedging needs are high, but lower debt to higher cash if their hedging needs are low. We provide empirical evidence that supports our theory. Our analysis points to an important hedging motive behind cash and debt management policies. It suggests that cash should not be viewed as negative debt in the presence of financing frictions.