Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(933)
- Faculty Publications (123)
- April 2015
- Article
Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Kanz and Leora Klapper
This paper uses a series of experiments with commercial bank loan officers to test the effect of performance incentives on risk assessment and lending decisions. We first show that while high-powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Just Who Put You in Charge? We Did: Credit Rating Agencies and the Politics of Ratings
By: Rawi Abdelal and Mark Blyth
- June 2014
- Article
Frictions in Shadow Banking: Evidence from the Lending Behavior of Money Market Funds
By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam
We document the consequences of money market fund risk taking during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of security-level holdings of prime money market funds, we show that funds with large exposures to risky Eurozone banks suffered significant... View Details
- March 2014 (Revised June 2015)
- Case
Can Mexico Make Democracy Work?
By: Gunnar Trumbull and Jonathan Schlefer
Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the old Mexican ruling party elected in 2012, passed the most fundamental reforms in at least two decades. They included allowing private competition in the energy sector, including with the state-owned oil company,... View Details
Keywords: Democratization; Economic Development; Competition Policy; Exchange Rates; Comparative Advantage; Growth and Development; Government Legislation; Political Elections; Economic Growth; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Energy Industry; Communications Industry; Banking Industry; Latin America; Mexico
- December 2013 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Breaking Bad (the Rules): Argentina Defaults, Inflates (and Grows), 1997–2015
By: Rafael Di Tella and Fernanda Miguel
In late October 2011, after losing 1 billion of dollar reserves in one month, the Argentine government began imposing a series of currency controls, limiting the ability to buy foreign currency. As of October 2011, Argentina's tax collection agency AFIP had been... View Details
- March 2013
- Article
Bridging the Gap? Government Subsidized Lending and Access to Capital
By: Josh Lerner and Kristle Romero-Cortes
The consequences of providing public funds to financial institutions remain controversial. We examine the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund's impact on credit union activity, using hitherto little studied U.S. Treasury data. The CDFI Fund grants... View Details
- September 2012 (Revised July 2013)
- Case
Can the Eurozone Survive?
By: Dante Roscini and Jonathan Schlefer
The sovereign debt crisis that took Greece by storm in 2010 began to spread to other European markets. Within a few months Ireland and Portugal had also lost access to the sovereign debt markets and had to rely on supranational loans for their financing. The risk of... View Details
- July 2012
- Article
The Real Consequences of Market Segmentation
By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam
We study the real effects of market segmentation due to credit ratings using a matched sample of firms just above and just below the investment-grade cutoff. These firms have similar observables, including average investment rates. However, flows into high-yield mutual... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Reaching-for-yield—the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields—is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper analyses this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details
- May 18, 2012
- Article
Randomized Government Safety Inspections Reduce Worker Injuries with No Detectable Job Loss
By: David I Levine, Michael W. Toffel and Matthew S. Johnson
Controversy surrounds occupational health and safety regulators, with some observers claiming that workplace regulations damage firms' competitiveness and destroy jobs and others arguing that they make workplaces safer at little cost to employers and employees. We... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Bouncing Out of the Banking System: An Empirical Analysis of Involuntary Bank Account Closures
By: Dennis Campbell, F. Asis Martinez-Jerez and Peter Tufano
Using a new database, we document the factors that relate to the extent of involuntary consumer bank account closure resulting from excessive overdraft activity. Consumers who have accounts involuntarily closed for overdraft activity may have limited or no access to... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
The Economics of Housing Finance Reform
By: David S. Scharfstein and Adi Sunderam
This paper analyzes the two leading types of proposals for reform of the housing finance system: (i) broad-based, explicit, priced government guarantees of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and (ii) privatization. Both proposals have drawbacks. Properly-priced... View Details
- March 2011
- Article
Institutional Demand Pressure and the Cost of Corporate Loans
By: Victoria Ivashina and Zheng Sun
Between 2001 and 2007, annual institutional funding in highly leveraged loans went up from $32 billion to $426 billion, accounting for nearly 70% of the jump in total syndicated loan issuance over the same period. Did the inflow of institutional funding in the... View Details
- October 2010 (Revised November 2010)
- Case
The Export-Import Bank of the United States
By: C. Fritz Foley and Matthew Johnson
In the fall of 2009, Fred Hochberg, chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im), and his team struggled to find a way to help finance the sale of Boeing aircraft to Emirates. Ex-Im responds to the challenges in the credit market with an innovative... View Details
Keywords: Trade; Credit; Financing and Loans; International Finance; Banking Industry; United States
- October 2010
- Supplement
The Export-Import Bank of the United States (CW)
By: C. Fritz Foley and Matthew Johnson
In the fall of 2009, Fred Hochberg, Chairman of The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im), and his team struggled to find a way to help finance the sale of Boeing aircraft to Emirates. Ex-Im responds to the challenges in credit market with an innovative... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Crashes and Collateralized Lending
By: Jakub W. Jurek and Erik Stafford
This paper develops a parsimonious static model for characterizing financing terms in collateralized lending markets. We characterize the systematic risk exposures for a variety of securities and develop a simple indifference-pricing framework to value the systematic... View Details
- September 2010
- Article
How Firms Respond to Being Rated
By: Aaron K. Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel
While many rating systems seek to help buyers overcome information asymmetries when making purchasing decisions, we investigate how these ratings also influence the companies being rated. We hypothesize that ratings are particularly likely to spur responses from firms... View Details
- 2010
- Mimeo
An Analysis of the Impact of 'Substantially Heightened' Capital Requirements on Large Financial Institutions
By: Anil Kashyap, Jeremy C. Stein and Samuel G. Hanson
We examine the impact of "substantially heightened" capital requirements on large financial institutions, and on their customers. Our analysis yields three main conclusions. First, the frictions associated with raising new external equity finance are likely to be... View Details
- May 2010
- Article
Loan Syndication and Credit Cycles
By: Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein
Cyclicality in the supply of business credit has been the focus of a considerable amount of research. This cyclicality can stem from shocks to borrowers' collateral, which affect firms' ability to raise capital if agency and information problems are significant (Ben S.... View Details
- 2010
- Other Unpublished Work
God, Government and Outsiders: The Influence of Religious Beliefs on Depositor Behavior in an Emerging Market.
By: Ayesha K. Khan and Tarun Khanna
This paper provides evidence that religious beliefs can have a significant impact on individual financial choices. Using proprietary panel data on the distribution of bank deposits across all commercial banks in Pakistan over a 33-month period, I find that Islamic... View Details