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Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 137 No. 3 2020

Is there a paradox of pledgeability?

Dan Bernhardt1; Kostas Koufopoulos2; Giulio Trigilia3

1 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · 2 University of York · 3 University of Rochester

Abstract

We show that in the limited-commitment framework of Donaldson et al. (2019), firm value always increases in the fraction of cash flows that can be pledged as collateral. That is, pledgeability increases investment efficiency and relaxes a firm’s financing constraint. We derive this conclusion using the same contracts considered by the authors and generalize the result to an arbitrary number of states. We also show that the first best can always be implemented by a nonstate-contingent secured debt contract, which differs from the ones they consider.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfineco.2020.05.003
Volume
137
Issue
3
Pages
606-611
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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