valuation and control in venture finance this paper presents the model of a relationship between a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur engaged in the formation of a new firm i assume that the entrepreneur derives private nonpecuniary benefits from having some control over the firm i show that to separate the entrepreneur s value of control from the firm s expected payoff the venture capitalist demands disproportionately higher control rights than the size of his equity investment the entrepreneur is compensated for a greater loss of control through better terms of financing ability to extract higher rents from asymmetric information and improved risk sharing venture capital firms often finance projects which at the time of funding have neither revenues nor even a product in existence however by using an intricate system of control rights venture capitalists can overcome many failures inevitable in a complex task of converting entrepreneurial talent into companies products and markets

marriage market divorce legislation and household labor supply this paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the marriage market and divorce legislation on household labor supply in our approach the sex ratio in the marriage market and the rules governing divorce are examples of distribution factors these factors are defined as variables that affect the household members bargaining position but not preferences or the joint budget set we extend the collective labor supply model developed by chiappori to allow for distribution factors we show that our model imposes new restrictions on the labor supply functions and eases the identification of individual preferences and the intrahousehold decision process the model is estimated using psid data for the year 1988 our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model also the sex ratio and divorce laws deemed favorable to women are found to affect labor supply behavior and the decision process in the directions predicted by the theory and to have sizable effects

choosing winners and losers in a classroom permit trading game in many economics classes from principles to environmental economics and public finance we teach students that tradable pollution permits are an efficient way to achieve the socially optimal level of pollution this can be shown to students relatively easily using standard firm cost curves or simply by discussing how firms that can cheaply reduce their pollution can sell their rights to firms with higher pollution reduction costs it is often more difficult to convince students that for a fixed level of permits the initial allocation of permits does not affect the efficiency of the trading program but only the distribution of the financial burden of reducing pollution 2 understanding the distributional effects of trading programs is important because equity issues are what make some trading programs controversial for example the initial allocation of permits is one of the contentious issues in developing an international tradable permit program for greenhouse gas emissions to illustrate the distributional effects of a permit trading program we have developed a simple classroom game this game can also be used more generally to show how the distribution of property rights determines who internalizes an externality but does not affect whether the social optimum is achieved this game can be conducted in a 50 minute class with a short follow up discussion in the next class period and requires only a deck of playing cards index cards and copies of the instructions and record sheets in the appendix 3

rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

social security pensions and retirement behavior within the family this paper estimates a structural model of family retirement using us data from the health and retirement study hrs it provides further insight into household retirement decision making and the reasons for interdependence in the retirement decisions of each spouse improvements in hrs data and matched employer provided pension histories allow more precise identification of key parameters governing interdependent behaviour within the household in an earlier study we found that interdependence was due to preferences rather than coordination of retirement incentives in the budget and in particular that it is not a correlation in preferences but the appearance of the spouse s retirement status in the husband s and wife s utility function that is largely responsible for coordination of retirement between spouses we now find that a measure of how much each spouse values being able to spend time in retirement with the other accounts for a good portion of that apparent interdependence for the wife the husband s retirement status influences her retirement decision only if she values spending time in retirement with her husband for husbands the effect of having the wife already retired on his retirement decision is roughly doubled if he enjoys spending time in retirement with his wife but there is some effect even if he does not this is consistent with our earlier findings that the husband is more influenced by having a retired spouse than the wife is the increase in the extent of the dependence of the wife s labour supply on the husband s retirement from our past work probably is traceable to better measurement of the opportunity set facing the husband in hrs data once estimated we use the model to investigate the labour supply effects of alternative social security policies examining the effect of dividing credit for earnings evenly between spouses or of basing social security benefits on the amounts accumulated in private accounts both policies change the relative importance of spouse and survivor social security benefits within the household and both raise the relative reward to work later in the life cycle the incentives created are modest and retirement responds accordingly nevertheless at some ages such as 65 there may be as much as a 6 increase in the old age work force under privatized accounts copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

knowledge accumulation within an organization in this article we consider a knowledge accumulation problem within an organization that cannot prevent the worker from quitting and using the knowledge outside the organization we show that knowledge accumulation is delayed the fraction of working time allocated to knowledge creation is highest at the early career stage falls gradually then rises again before falling finally toward zero we determine the effect of a change in the severity of the enforcement problem or the specificity of knowledge we also discuss the form of the optimal life cycle wage profiles the role of the initial knowledge level and the role of discounting

macroeconomic shocks and banking regulation the recent crisis has brought to the fore the cyclical properties of banking regulation countercyclical buffers and enhanced capital requirements meant to stabilize banks balance sheets across the cycle are not costless and a delicate balance needs to be reached between providing incentives to generate value and discouraging excessive risk taking the paper develops a model in which in contrast with modigliani miller outside equity and capital requirements matter it analyses banking regulation in the presence of macroeconomic shocks and studies the desirability of self insurance mechanisms such as countercyclical capital buffers or dynamic provisioning as well as macro hedges such as cocos and capital insurance

how sensitive are retirement decisions to financial incentives a stated preference analysis we study the effects of financial incentives on retirement decisions using stated preference data dutch survey respondents were given hypothetical retirement scenarios describing age s of partial and full retirement and replacement rate s a stylized model is estimated in which utility is the discounted sum of within period utilities that depend on employment status and income parameters of the utility function vary with observed and unobserved characteristics simulations show that the income and substitution effects of pensions as a function of the retirement age are substantial and larger than according to studies using data on actual retirement decisions in the netherlands

rational beliefs and security design this article studies the security design problem of a cash constrained firm facing investors with diverse beliefs investor rational beliefs are modeled as varying and yet rational in the sense of kurz 1994 with two investors optimal designs are similar under rational beliefs and rational expectations with many investors however optimal securities under rational beliefs maximize investor differences of opinion while under rational expectations optimal designs minimize disagreements we demonstrate that the common practice of issuing multiple securities backed by a single asset is optimal under rational beliefs but not under rational expectations researching market beliefs can create substantial value for firms article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

retirement in dual career families a structural model a structural econometric model of retirement of dual career couples is specified and estimated with panel data from the national longitudinal survey of mature women a coincidence of spouses retiring together despite the younger ages of wives suggests explicit efforts at coordination the estimates suggest that one reason is a correlation of tastes for leisure more important each spouse and perhaps husbands in particular values retirement more once their spouse has retired the opportunity set accounts for peaks in the retirement hazards of each spouse individually but not for peaks in the simultaneous retirement of both spouses

the market for bushmeat colobus satanas on bioko island abstract species conservation is an important issue worldwide the market for monkeys consumed as food on bioko island equatorial guinea is modeled as a bargaining game the bargaining set up leads to the conclusion that black colobus are being over hunted using daily data an empirical density is fit to the price quantity pairs resulting from exchange between buyers and retailers the density provides support for the bargaining model quantile regressions are also fit to the data the median quantile indicates buyers have greater bargaining power than retailers knowing who has bargaining power aids in the design of policy to reduce bushmeat hunting strategic elasticities are constructed from the quantiles given the harvest rate of monkeys and the elasticity estimates the monkeys of bioko island are under considerable pressure

labor force dynamics of older married couples this article analyzes the dynamics of joint labor force behavior of older couples in the united states using the retirement history survey rhs i analyze the determinants of joint retirement and the effect of one spouse s labor force status on the labor force transitions of the other spouse the results reveal strong associations between the labor force transition probabilities of one spouse and the labor force status of the other spouse these result from structural differences in exit and entry behavior by the spouse s status several lagged endogenous variables have substantial effects on behavior even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity

multitask agency problems focus and task clustering abstract this short paper discusses recent insights of multitask agency theory it considers in turn the issues of effort substitution conflicts between tasks and implicit incentives and mission it concludes by addressing the problem of optimal task clustering

venture capitalists as principals contracting screening and monitoring there is a large academic literature on the principal agent problem in financial contracting this literature focuses on the conflicts of interest between an agent who is an entrepreneur with a venture that needs financing and a principal who is the investor providing the funds for the venture theory has identified a number of ways that the investor principal can mitigate these conflicts first the investor can structure financial contracts i e the allocation of cash flow and control rights between the entrepreneur and investor to provide incentives for the entrepreneur to behave optimally second the investor can engage in information collection before deciding whether to invest in order to screen out ex ante unprofitable projects and bad entrepreneurs and third the investor can engage in information collection and monitoring once the project is under way despite the large volume of theory empirical work has lagged behind in comparing the contracts and actions of real world principals to their counterparts in financial contracting theory in this paper we describe recent empirical work and its relation to theory for one prominent class of such principals venture capitalists vc s in our view vc s are real world entities that closely approximate the investors of theory vc s invest in entrepreneurs who need financing to fund a promising project or company vc s have strong incentives to maximize value but at the same time receive few or no private benefits of control although they are intermediaries vc s typically receive at least 20 percent of the profits on their portfolios see paul gompers and josh lerner 1999 in addition to being interesting from a theoretical perspective vc actions and contracts of are interesting from a practical perspective vc s have been extremely successful in the last several years i they have been associated with a number of the prominent corporate successes like ariba cisco ebay and yahoo ii they have generated substantial returns and wealth for their investors and iii they have raised and invested record amounts of money

multistage capital budgeting with delayed consumption of slack capital budgeting frequently involves multiple stages at which firms can continue or abandon ongoing projects in this paper we study a project requiring two stages of investment failure to fund stage 1 of the investment precludes investment in stage 2 whereas failure to fund stage 2 results in early termination in contrast to the existing literature we assume that the firm can limit the manager s informational rents with the early termination of the project in this setting we find that the firm optimally commits to a capital allocation scheme whereby it forgoes positive net present value npv projects at stage 1 capital rationing whereas at stage 2 depending on the manager s previous report it sometimes implements projects with a negative continuation npv but in other situations forgoes implementing projects with positive continuation npvs this paper was accepted by mary barth accounting

investment ramifications of distortionary tax subsidies abstract this paper examines the investment effects of tax subsidies for which some assets and not others are eligible distortionary tax subsidies concentrate investments in tax favored assets thereby reducing the expected pre tax profitability of investment and reducing payoffs to bondholders in the event of default anticipation of asset substitution encourages lenders to require covenants in debt contracts which only imperfectly address asset substitution and distort investment the result is that borrowing is made more expensive which in turn discourages investment borrowing rates can react so strongly that aggregate investment may rise very little or even fall in response to higher tax subsidies debt issued by u s firms in risk of default after the 2002 introduction of bonus depreciation for u s equipment investment contained many more covenants than in other periods a pattern that reversed when bonus depreciation was discontinued after 2004 furthermore firms at risk of default borrowed less and were more apt to lease capital than were other firms during the bonus depreciation period

creditor rights and debt allocation within multinationals we analyze the optimal debt structure of multinational corporations choosing between centralized or decentralized borrowing we identify how this choice is affected by creditor rights and bankruptcy costs taking into account managerial incentives and coinsurance considerations we find that partially centralized borrowing structures are optimal with either weak or strong creditor rights for intermediate levels of creditor rights fully decentralized centralized borrowing structures are optimal if managers have strong weak empire building tendencies decentralized borrowing is more attractive for companies focussing on short term profitability credits are rather taken in countries with better creditor rights and more efficient insolvency systems

the financing of research and development evidence on the funding gap for rd 2 evidence for high costs of rd 3 there are limits to venture capital as a solution to the funding gap especially in countries where public equity markets are not highly developed and 4 further study of governmental seed capital and subsidy programs using quasi experimental methods is warranted

disproportional control rights and the governance role of debt we examine the governance role of debt in the context of u s based dual class ownership structures we hypothesize that the use of debt alleviates the conflict between shareholder classes by balancing the power of controlling insiders we document that dual class firms have higher leverage and a greater propensity to issue private debt they also more frequently use cash sweeps and performance based covenants dual class firms with greater agency conflicts and a greater need to access the capital market appear to rely more extensively on debt these findings are consistent with controlling insiders bonding against the agency costs associated with dual class ownership the governance role of debt is further corroborated by the valuation effect of debt for dual class companies private debt issuances trigger greater positive market reactions to the inferior dual class stock in relation to both the superior dual class stock and a matched sample of single class firms further leverage attenuates the previou

opening the black box of intra household decision making theory and non parametric empirical tests of general collective consumption models we provide revealed preference tests of general collective consumption models that account for public consumption and externalities within the household we further propose a novel approach to model special cases of this model which imply alternative assumptions regarding the sharing rule our application uses the panel data from the russia longitudinal monitoring survey we find that the general model together with a large class of special cases cannot be rejected by contrast we do reject the standard unitary model since our tests are entirely nonparametric this provides strong evidence in favor of models focusing on intrahousehold decision making

managing local commons theoretical issues in incentive design local commons encompass a wide range of resources whose shared feature is the need for some form of collective management in what follows we shall be concerned mainly with the problems of implementing a collective management plan whatever the mechanisms invoked many recent contributions to the literature have stressed that relatively informal collective management of common property resources can in the right circumstances avoid the severe resource degradation predicted by the tragedy of the commons nevertheless both empirical and theoretical arguments suggest that cooperative behavior may be only partial and the incentives of short term self interest only partially held in check under what circumstances then can more formal implementation mechanisms make good the deficiency and given that formal incentives are typically stronger than informal ones are there any reasons why informal incentives might nevertheless sometimes be preferred

fuzzy relations for the analysis of traders preferences in an information market game in this paper we focus on preference and decision data gathered during a computer supported information market game in which 35 students participated during seven consecutive trading sessions the participants individual preferences on the market shares are collected to calculate a collective preference ranking using the borda social choice method comparing this preference ranking to the shares actual market ranking resulting from the participants trading we find a statistically significant difference between both rankings as the preferences established by market behavior cannot be adequately explained through a social choice rule we propose an alternative explanation based on the herd behavior phenomenon where traders imitate the most successful trader in the market using a decision analysis technique based on fuzzy relations we study the participants rankings of the best share in the market during 7 weeks and compare the most successful trader to the other traders the results from our analysis show that a substantial number of traders is indeed following the market leader

covenants in venture capital contracts this paper studies how covenants are included in contracts between venture capitalists vcs and entrepreneurs i show that vcs hold covenanted veto rights even though they are shareholders who have access to other powerful governance solutions unlike bank loans and bonds venture capital vc contracts exhibit considerable variation in their contractual designs i exploit this variation to confirm the argument that covenants are in place to overcome a conflict of interest that arises from debt like contractual features of a venture capitalist s preferred stock in particular i find that contracts with higher fixed payoffs include 1 6 more covenants than do contracts with lower fixed payoffs similarly vc contracts with no vc board majority requirement include 0 6 more covenants than do contracts that require a vc board majority covenants are also more common with older companies and when fewer vcs invest in a round my findings contribute to both the debt covenant literature and the entrepreneurial finance literature this paper was accepted by brad barber finance

control rights and capital structure an empirical investigation we show that incentive conflicts between firms and their creditors have a large impact on corporate debt policy net debt issuing activity experiences a sharp and persistent decline following debt covenant violations when creditors use their acceleration and termination rights to increase interest rates and reduce the availability of credit the effect of creditor actions on debt policy is strongest when the borrower s alternative sources of finance are costly in addition despite the less favorable terms offered by existing creditors borrowers rarely switch lenders following a violation a fundamental question in financial economics is how do firms choose their financial policies extant empirical research on this question has focused primarily on the presence of taxes and bankruptcy costs e g scott 1976 information asymmetry e g myers and majluf 1984 and more recently market timing behavior e g baker and wurgler 2002 however beginning with jensen and meckling 1976 a large body of theoretical research examines how incentive conflicts between managers and external investors affect corporate financial policies in particular theoretical research on financial contracting shows that in the presence of incentive conflicts optimal debt contracts will allocate certain rights to creditors after negative performance in order to help firms secure financing ex ante e g aghion and bolton 1992 and dewatripont and tirole

do regulated microfinance institutions achieve better sustainability and outreach cross country evidence in spite of increasing pressure on microfinance institutions mfis operating in developing countries to transform into regulated financial intermediaries to date no study has investigated whether regulated mfis actually achieve better financial results and reach more poor clients than nonregulated mfis this article explores the impact of regulation on mfi performance using newly released data for 114 mfis from 62 countries in an empirical model where performance is specified as a function of mfi specific regulatory macroeconomic and institutional variables consistent with recent cross country evidence on the impact of banking regulations on bank performance barth et al 2004 this article finds that regulatory involvement does not directly affect performance either in terms of operational self sustainability or outreach the article also finds that less leveraged mfis have better sustainability the policy implication is that mfis transformation into regulated financial institutions is may not

multimarket equilibrium trade and the law of one price this paper describes the setup of two classroom markets one with a thin supply side and relatively higher prices a comparison of the equilibrium price tendencies in the two markets helps students discover how to apply supply and demand analysis in this context the introduction of speculators who buy in one market and sell in the other reduces or eliminates the price disparity class discussion can be focused on how nonproductive speculation can increase surplus measures of efficiency when price is permitted to convey the correct information about opportunity cost use this experiment can be used in classes in the principles of economics intermediate economics or international trade to illustrate supply and demand analysis and the effects of inter market trade in upper level classes optimal bidding can be addressed as well time reading instructions and completing five trading rounds takes 30 to 40 minutes discussion lasts an additional 15 minutes materials one deck of cards for up to 36 students one copy of the instructions and eight small blank slips of paper for each student

household labor supply what kind of data can tell us how many decision makers there are although in empirical work the neoclassical assumption of the household as a homogeneous decision making unit is still predominant there appears to be an increasing interest in models of household labor supply based on game theoretic notions examples are ashworth and ulph 1981 bjorn and vuong 1984 1985 brown and chuang 1981 brown and manser 1978 horney and mcelroy 1988 mcelroy and horney 1981 mcelroy 1990 schultz 1990 thomas 1990 quite a few of these papers also attempt to test the assumption of one decision maker against the more general bargaining framework typically these take the form of tests for certain restrictions on the data that should hold if the neoclassical model were valid and which need not hold in the game theoretic framework chiappori 1988b argues that a truly valid test of a bargaining model should leave from the notion that observed data are the result from some cooperative game being played by the household members without specifying the solution concept he then goes on to argue that the restrictions placed on the data by such an assumption are quite mild indeed in a separate paper chiappori 1988a derives restrictions on observed labor supply functions based on this notion however his main result is based on rather special assumptions in this note we put the various results in perspective our basic obser

optimal financial instruments debt and equity are developed as optimal financial instruments in a model where cash flows and control rights are allocated to investors endogenously when investment decisions must be made by a single party the debtholder s cash flows are fixed in order to provide the equityholder with efficient incentives for investment ownership of control may be transferred to the debtholder to attenuate the impact of asymmetric information concerning the investment opportunity on the efficiency of the decision making since the classic article by modigliani and miller 1958 a great deal of attention has been focused on the problem of determining the optimal capital structure of the firm spanning taxes and or transaction cost agency cost and signalling arguments have been offered as explanations for why a firm s cash flows might be split between debt and equity claimants in a particular way here we address the more basic question of the optimal design of the securities that firms issue the majority of the existing literature takes the form of the allowable financial instruments as given in defense of this approach it may be noted that to a first approximation firms have used two standard financial instruments debt and equity we argue here however that the characterization of the standard instruments used in much of the literature has been incomplete and that the incentives of decision makers within the firm cannot be completely understood until the problem is addressed from a more basic level than is typically done by concentrating on the cash flow characteristics of these instruments the equally important issue of the way the standard instruments distribute the control rights of the firm has been ignored as a consequence the objectives in corporate decision making have been assumed rather than developed endogenously we consider the allocation of cash flows and the distribution of control rights to optimal financial instruments in a security design problem by considering the design of securities in this way we are able to consider the

economic science an experimental approach for teaching and research economics experiments have been used to study theories and policies that are often difficult to evaluate with data from naturally occurring markets this paper is a selective summary of my work in the main areas of experimental economics markets individual decisions games and public choice the discussion pertains both to scientific discoveries and teaching innovations

heterogeneity in risky choice behaviour in a broad population we analyse risk preferences using an experiment with real incentives in a representative sample of 1 422 dutch respondents our econometric model incorporates four structural parameters that vary with observed and unobserved characteristics utility curvature loss aversion preferences towards the timing of uncertainty resolution and the propensity to choose randomly rather than on the basis of preferences we find that all four parameters contribute to explaining choice behaviour the structural parameters are significantly associated with socio economic variables but it is essential to incorporate unobserved heterogeneity in each of them to match the rich variety of choice patterns in the data

covenants and collateral as incentives to monitor although monitoring borrowers is thought to be a major function of financial institutions the presence of other claimants reduces an institutional lender s incentives to do this thus loan contracts must be structured to enhance the lender s incentives to monitor covenants make a loan s effective maturity and the ability to collateralize makes a loan s effective priority contingent on monitoring by the lender thus both covenants and collateral can be motivated as contractual devices that increase a lender s incentive to monitor these results are consistent with a number of stylized facts about the use of covenants and collateral in institutional lending modern finance theory suggests that financial intermediaries such as commercial banks insurance companies and finance companies monitor and control their borrowers on behalf of other investors 1 this article investigates how the loans made by these institutions can be structured so as to best enhance the institutions role as delegated monitors covenants and collateral are common features of loans made by financial institutions but these features are somewhat difficult to justify consider loan covenants clauses in a loan contract that require the borrower to take or refrain from various actions berlin and mester 1992 magee and sridhar 1994 and park 1994 show that by giving institutions the right to renegotiate or call loans when covenants are violated covenants serve as tripwires that enhance the flexibility and efficiency of financial contracting also as documented in smith and warner 1979 control rights from covenants reduce borrower adverse selection or moral hazard nevertheless by allowing institutions to demand repayment based on any information contractible or not

information and control in ventures and alliances this paper develops a theory of control as a signal of congruence of objectives and applies it to nancial contracting between an investor and a privately informed entrepreneur we show that formal investor control is i increasing in the information asymmetries ex ante ii increasing in the uncertainty surrounding the venture ex post iii decreasing in the entrepreneur s resources and iv increasing in the entrepreneur s incentive consict in contrast real investor control that is actual investor interference is decreasing in information asymmetries control rights are further such that control shifts to the investor in bad states of nature

ambivalent investment and the hold up problem in this paper we add to the foundations of incomplete contracting literature we study the hold up problem with ambivalent investment where investment benefits the investing party if ex post the right decision is undertaken but harms the investing party if the wrong decision is made in this context we show that the power of contracts to provide investment incentives depends on three factors the commitment value of contracts the amount of quasirents that the investing party can expect in the case of out of contract renegotiation and the degree of ambivalence of investment first contracts provide first best investment incentives when parties can commit to a contract regardless of the type of investment second with sufficiently ambivalent investment if parties cannot commit not to renegotiate a contract and if the investing party s bargaining power is intermediate contracts cannot improve investment incentives above those provided by no contract in contrast a simple buyer or seller option contract is optimal when the investing party s bargaining power is extreme jel d23 k12 l22

gradual retirement financial incentives and labour supply of older workers evidence from a stated preference analysis abstract using data from a stated preferences experiment in the netherlands we find that replacing full time pension schemes with schemes that offer gradual retirement opportunities induce workers to retire one year later on average total lifetime labour supply however decreases by 3 4 months because the positive effect of delayed retirement on labour supply is cancelled out by a reduction in working hours in the years before full retirement the impact of gradual retirement schemes is however heterogeneous across groups of workers workers in bad health who gain access to gradual retirement postpone their retirement by 1 7 months more than workers in good health this suggests that introduction of gradual retirement alleviates to a certain extent the health related burden that employees in poor health may experience in carrying out their work nevertheless introduction of gradual retirement reduces the total labour supply of both groups of workers financial incentives either in terms of changing pension income or the price of leisure also affect expected retirement age but the impact of these financial incentives does not differ with the possibility of gradual retirement finally we find that gradual retirement is not a preferred option among workers as the large majority prefers full retirement

should banks own equity stakes in their borrowers a contractual solution to hold up problems abstract this paper develops a model to answer the question whether a bank should hold a share of the equity of a borrowing firm the model shows that a small equity stake held by the bank can have a significant and positive impact on the lending relationship the benefit of bank equity participation arises from the reduced ability of the bank to extract rents from the firm in multiple rounds of financing this in turn improves the firm s incentive to make investments in profitable projects that require future outside finance the benefit is likely to be significant for small to medium size firms growth firms and firms with ongoing capital needs the paper addresses from a corporate finance perspective the current debate about whether banks should be allowed to own equity stakes in corporations and how large these equity stakes should be

moral hazard hold up and the optimal allocation of control rights i examine the optimal allocation of control rights in a model with manager moral hazard where the manager and investor may hold up each other ex post the control allocation determines both the likelihood of hold up and the agents renegotiation payoffs in equilibrium only two control allocations are optimal either exclusive investor control or a contingent control allocation that allows the manager to remain in control if and only if interim performance is good thus my model explains why it may be optimal to link control to thefirm s performance such that managers retain control only following good performance

accounting information in financial contracting the incomplete contract theory perspective this paper reviews theoretical and empirical work on financial contracting that is relevant to accounting researchers its primary objective is to discuss how the use of accounting information in contracts enhances contracting efficiency and to suggest avenues for future research we argue that incomplete contract theory broadens our understanding of both the role accounting information plays in contracting and the mechanisms through which efficiency gains are achieved by discussing its rich theoretical implications we expect incomplete contract theory to prove useful in motivating future research and in offering directions to advance our knowledge of how accounting information affects contract efficiency

does the japanese governance system enhance shareholder wealth evidence from the stock price effects of top management turnover this article examines the stock price effects of top management turnover announcements for 432 japanese corporations from 1985 to 1990 we find that these announcements are associated with significantly positive abnormal returns the returns are greater when turnover is forced than when turnover represents normal succession the stock price effects are also significantly positive when turnover is forced and the successor is appointed from outside the firm we find that large shareholders play an important role during outside succession this evidence suggests that the disciplinary decisions of japanese governance mechanisms are consistent with shareholder wealth maximization article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

contracting between firms empirical evidence abstract we analyze contracts between a large buyer and her suppliers we find that contracts with critical product suppliers contain more clauses that address moral hazard primarily through monitoring if holdup concerns are larger there are more contractual protections against it over time contracts with the same supplier include additional provisions that address moral hazard through monitoring this dynamic effect is strongest for service contracts where observability and verifiability are initially lower our findings indicate that contracts become more complete over time and provide support to incomplete contracting models that argue that contracts become more complete as contracting costs decrease jel classification d86 k12 l24

capital structure under costly enforcement we consider financial structure and repayment behavior in a setting where cash flows are private information to the entrepreneur and the cost of enforcing repayment differs across security holders if enforcement costs are lower for shareholders than for creditors a mixed capital structure with debt and equity can obtain in equilibrium under a mixed capital structure creditors intervene in low cash flow states while shareholders intervene in high cash flow states moreover strategic defaults costly bankruptcy shareholder intervention and violation of absolute priority occur with positive probability on the equilibrium path several of the predictions from our framework are consistent with evidence not readily explainable by existing theories

tax and subsidy incidence equivalence theories experimental evidence from competitive markets abstract a basic tenet in microeconomics is tax incidence equivalence which holds that the burden of a unit tax on buyers and sellers is independent of who actually pays the tax by contrast policymakers and the public often mistake statutory incidence for economic incidence using competitive laboratory markets i test both tax incidence equivalence and an analogous theorem for subsidies for sufficiently large markets the results show strong support for both theories there is little to no evidence even in the short run of the popular misperception that statutory incidence equals economic incidence in smaller markets in which competitive forces are weaker and relative bargaining strengths may play a role the evidence for tax incidence equivalence is weaker as minor price discrepancies may persist between markets

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

understanding joint retirement abstract evidence from different sources shows that spouses retirement decisions are correlated retirement policies affecting individuals in couples are therefore also likely to affect behavior of their spouses it is therefore important to account for joint features in modeling retirement this paper studies a structural collective model of labor supply and retirement of both partners in a couple with interdependent preferences imperfect knowledge of preferences of the spouse and subjective expectations about the future we propose a novel method to estimate preferences and the intra household bargaining process which relies on stated preferences data collected in the health and retirement study respondents were asked to choose between hypothetical retirement trajectories describing the retirement ages and replacement rates of both spouses from three perspectives considering their own preferences only the preferences of their spouse only or the most likely decision for the household with these data all model parameters are identified and potential sources of joint retirement can be disentangled our results suggest that males misperceive their wives preferences overestimating their disutility of work our estimates correct for this we find strong positive correlations between preferences for joint leisure leisure complementarity of the two partners counterfactual simulations with stylized retirement paths suggest that the leisure complementarities explain a substantial part of joint retirement much more than correlation in unobserved heterogeneity or potential wage rates

voluntary environmental agreements and competition policy voluntary environmental agreements are oftensuspected to promote collusive practicesbetween participating firms the paperaddresses the antitrust implications ofgermany s voluntary dual management system forpackaging waste collection and recycling dsd it uses analytical tools of the economictheory of the firm to examine features ofdsd s governance structure that were oftenidentified to impede competition while thepaper does not argue that dsd performs asefficiently as a hypothetical solution in amore competitive setting it shows that thesefeatures have an economic rationale from theviewpoint of the theory of the firm thegeneral conclusion is that it is necessary tocarefully analyze the institutional fine tuningof a voluntary agreement in order to derive theoverall impact stemming from a formal lack ofcompetition a more case to case oriented institutional research approach could thereforefruitfully supplement model driven theoreticalanalyses of voluntary environmental agreementsand their effect on market competition

monitoring and structure of debt contracts this paper presents a theory of optimal debt structure when the moral hazard problem is severe the main idea is that the optimal debt contract delegates monitoring to a single senior lender and that seniority allows the monitoring senior lender to appropriate the full return from his monitoring activities the theory explains i why debt contracts are prioritized ii why short term debt is senior to long term debt and iii why financial intermediaries usually hold short term senior debt whereas long term junior debt is widely held another implication of the theory is that covenant and maturity structures will be set to conform to the seniority structure

the value of creditor control in corporate bonds this paper introduces a measure that captures the premium in bond prices that is due to the value of creditor control we estimate the premium as the difference in the bond price and an equivalent synthetic bond without control rights that is constructed using credit default swap cds contracts we find empirically that this premium increases as firm credit quality decreases and around important credit events such as defaults bankruptcies and covenant violations the increase is greatest for bonds most pivotal to changes in control changes in bond and cds liquidity do not appear to drive increases in the premium

the impact of ceo turnover on equity volatility this study investigates the effect on stock price volatility of a significant event in the life of the firm a change in its ceo we find significant long lived increases in volatility following ceo turnover after controlling for firm characteristics and marketwide volatility these increases are larger after forced departures and outside successions following voluntary departures stock prices also respond more strongly to earnings announcements following turnovers these results are consistent with more informative signals of value driving the increased volatility helping resolve two sources of uncertainty possible changes in the firm s strategy and doubt about the successor ceo s ability

capital and ownership structures and the market for corporate control the author analyzes optimal capital and ownership structures as resulting from anticipated future control contests he focuses on leverage as a device that enables the incumbent management to extract the maximum value from the rival he shows that firm value depends on both capital and ownership structures the analysis leads to the following predictions 1 more efficient managers use less debt 2 firms facing better rivals for control issue more debt and 3 firms with supermajority rules issue less debt several predictions are consistent with known empirical regularities article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the design of internal control and capital structure we study the design of internal control and capital structure we pose the question when is control allocated only to shareholders and when is it allocated to other stakeholders such as debtholders or the management team we show that shareholders debtholders get control when the firm s cash flow is relatively sensitive insensitive to managerial effort our theory implies that the signs of the correlations between endogenous variables when shareholders have absolute control are reversed when debtholders have veto power in particular debt level and firm value are negatively positively correlated when debtholders have veto power shareholders have absolute control article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

classroom games a market for lemons abstract the incentives that arise in markets with asymmetric information are illustrated in the classroom exercise presented here student sellers choose both a quality grade and a price for their products initially both prices and grades for all sellers are posted and buyers select from these offerings in this full information setup the market prices and grades quickly reach efficient levels that maximize total surplus next although sellers continue to choose grades and prices only prices not grades are posted for buyers to see when they shop the grades and prices then fall to inefficiently low levels the observed market outcomes in this exercise can stimulate useful discussion of asymmetric information market failure and remedies such as quality standards and warranties

classroom games trading in a pit market this paper describes a classroom exercise that resembles trading in the pit of some financial and futures markets playing cards are used to induce supply and demand functions instructions and helpful hints are provided the exercise facilitates an understanding and appreciation of the robustness and efficiency of the textbook model of perfect competition

a test of the unitary and collective models of household labour supply this paper tests the unitary and the collective household labour supply models within a structural framework a nonlinear unrestricted household labour supply system is postulated and the set of parametric restrictions imposed by each model is derived our results generally reject the income pooling restrictions embodied in the unitary model also the symmetry of cross wage effects is rejected however the collective model is not rejected for groups with no pre school children

using deferred compensation to strengthen the ethics of financial regulation abstract defects in the corporate governance of government owned enterprises tempt opportunistic officials to breach duties of public stewardship corporate governance theory suggests that incentive based deferred compensation could intensify the force that common law duties actually exert on regulatory managers in principle a forfeitable fund of deferred compensation could be combined with provisions for measuring verifying and rewarding multiperiod performance to make top regulators accountable for maximizing the long run net social benefits their enterprise produces because government deposit insurance enterprises are purveyors of credit enhancements for which private substitute and reinsurance markets exist their performance could be measured accurately enough to make employment contracts for deposit insurance ceos a promising place to experiment with this kind of accountability reform

the effects of health wealth and wages on labour supply and retirement behaviour this paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply retirement and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour pension or social security income the method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation hours worked and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model the model establishes that the tax structure of the social security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65 removing the tax wedge embedded in the social security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year by contrast social security benefit levels health and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages for example reducing social security benefits by 20 would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months

on the empirical implementation of some game theoretic models of household labor supply this paper discusses some issues in the empirical implementation of game theoretic models of household labor supply in particular we focus on the identification problems inherent in many of these models as an illustration we estimate a game theoretic model which uses data on preferred working hours as additional identifying information

accountability and decentralisation in government an incomplete contracts model this paper approaches the question of the appropriate level of decentralisation of power in government as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts the model of the paper compares allocations of power to local central and regional government as alternative means of motivating governments to act in the interests of citizens centralisation allows benefits from policy coordination but has costs in terms of diminished accountability which can be precisely defined as the reduced probability that the welfare of a given region can determine the re election of the government the model is extended to allow for conflicts of interest within regions and externalities between central and local governments in a federation it is also applied to determining levels of fiscal transfer between localities and to circumstances where governments may act as leviathans appropriating resources for their own use

managerial legacies entrenchment and strategic inertia this paper argues that the legacy potential of a firm s strategy is an important deter minant of ceo compensation turnover and strategy change a legacy makes ceo replacement expensive because firm performance can only partially be attributed to a newly employed manager boards may therefore optimally allow an incumbent to be entrenched moreover when a firm changes strategy it is optimal to change the ceo because the incumbent has a vested interest in seeing the new strategy fail even though ceos have no specific skills in our model legacy issues can explain the empirical association between ceo and strategy change this paper proposes a model of ceo replacement and puts forward a novel determinant for turnover decisions the legacy potential of a firm s strategy we mean by this the extent to which a manager s decisions affect future firm cash flows potentially beyond the manager s own tenure the replacement of a ceo is arguably one of the most important decisions a firm takes yet the theoretical and empirical finance literature has relatively little to say about the firm and manager specific characteristics that lead to one manager being fired and replaced by another as brickley 2003 points out the only variable that predicts turnover empirically is poor firm performance but it has little pre dictive power theoretical papers on managerial turnover tend to reduce ceo successions to a sequence of static interactions see below for more details as such they do not distinguish between a ceo who is hired and can start a fresh project or one who is constrained in this choice because he inherits a prede cessor s long term strategy our paper focuses on this latter phenomenon and investigates turnover decisions when strategy choices have a legacy potential the fact that a dynamic link exists between a ceo and his predecessor is probably more recognized in the accounting literature than in finance pourciau both authors are from the toulouse school of economics and the institut d administration des

optimal leverage and aggregate investment we analyze the optimal financing of investment projects when managers must exert unobservable effort and can also switch to less profitable riskier ventures optimal financial contracts can be implemented by a combination of debt and equity when the risk shifting problem is the most severe while stock options are also needed when the effort problem is the most severe worsening of the moral hazard problems leads to decreases in investment and output at the macroeconomic level moreover aggregate leverage decreases with the risk shifting problem and increases with the effort problem

wealth constraints and option contracts in models with sequential investments summary the paper investigates a model where two parties a and b invest sequentially in a joint project an asset investments and the asset value are nonverifiable and a is wealth constrained so that an initial outlay must be financed by either agent b insider financing or an external investor a bank c outsider financing we show that an option contract in combination with a loan arrangement facilitates first best investments and any arbitrary distribution of surplus if renegotiation is infeasible moreover the optimal strike price of the option is shown to dier across financing modes if renegotiation is admitted we identify conditions under which the first best can still be attained then either b financing or c financing may be strictly preferable and a combination of insider and outsider financing may be strictly optimal

competition policy in banking this paper summarizes some of the arguments relating competition and banking instability draws connections between regulation and competition policy and surveys and analyses the role of competition policy in the banking sector in a financial crisis it is argued that a trade off between competition and stability is bound to persist despite improvements in regulation that the banking sector specificity should be recognized by competition policy and that competition policy and regulation need close coordination copyright 2011 oxford university press

public trading and private incentives this article studies the link between public trading and the activity of a firm s large shareholder who can affect firm value public trading results in the formation of a stock price that is informative about the large shareholder s activity this increases the latter s incentives to engage in value increasing activities indeed if he has to liquidate part of his stake before the effect of his activity is publicly observed a more informative price rewards him for his activity implications are derived for the decision to go public capital structure and security design we consider a firm with a large shareholder and otherwise dispersed shares which are publicly traded the block holder is an insider in the sense that he can undertake actions that directly affect the firm s value moreover the insider might not take all value increasing actions as at least some of them involve a private cost for him in other words there is an incentive problem the article s main premise is that public trading as part of the price formation process generates information not only about exogenous factors affecting firm value but also about the insider s activity for instance as a result of public trading a firm s stock price will incorporate the market s evaluation of how a controlling shareholder allocates corporate resources we identify two sources of incentives for the insider to engage in activities that will increase firm value the first one is his stake in the firm since the insider participates in a value increase in proportion to his equity stake a larger stake increases the benefit to him from the firm value being high the view that large shareholders affect firm value is indeed widespread shleifer and vishny 1997 they alleviate the free rider problem pervasive in firms with passive dispersed investors unable or unwilling to affect the firm s operations that is outsiders

a theory of debt and equity diversity of securities and manager shareholder congruence this paper shows how the optimal financial structure of a firm complements incentive schemes to discipline managers and how the securities return streams determine the claim holders incentives to intervene in management the theory rationalizes 1 the multipucity of securities 2 the observed correlation between return streams and control rights of securities and 3 the partial congruence between managerial and equity holder preferences over policy choices and monetary rewards as well as the low level of interference of equity in management the theory also offers new prospects for a reappraisal of the earlier corporate finance literature

default and renegotiation a dynamic model of debt we analyze the role of debt in persuading an entrepreneur to pay out cash e ows rather than to divertthem in the e rstpartof the paper we study the optimal debt contract specie cally the trade off between the size of the loan and the repayment under the assumption that some debt contract is optimal in the second part we consider a more general class of nondebt contracts and derive sufficient conditions for debt to be optimal among these