Search Results
Report
Vesting and control in venture capital contracts
Vesting of equity payments to an entrepreneur, which is a form of time-contingent compensation, is very common in venture capital contracts. Empirical research suggests that vesting is used to help overcome asymmetric information and agency problems. We show in a theoretical model that vesting equity to an entrepreneur over a long period of time acts as a screening device against a bad entrepreneur type. But incomplete contracts due to hold-up by the venture capitalist imply that equity compensation, in the form of either short-term or long-term vesting, cannot provide standard contractible ...
Conference Paper
Balancing growth with equity: the view from development
Report
Financial intermediary balance sheet management
Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the firm?s assets. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the balance sheet management of financial intermediaries reveals that it is equity that behaves like the predetermined variable, and the asset size of the bank or financial intermediary is determined by the degree of leverage that is permitted by market conditions. The relative stickiness of equity reveals ...
Journal Article
Housing busts and household mobility: an update
Interest in the relationship between household mobility and financial frictions, especially frictions associated with negative home equity, has grown following the recent boom and bust in U.S. housing markets. With prices falling 30 percent nationally, negative equity greatly expanded across many markets. More recently, the decline in mortgage rates along with various policy interventions to encourage refinancing at historically low rates suggests the need to also revisit mortgage interest rate lock-in effects, which are likely to become important once Federal Reserve interest rate policy ...
Speech
Housing and the economic recovery
Remarks at the New Jersey Bankers Association Economic Forum, Iselin, New Jersey.
Speech
Basel and the wider financial stability agenda
Remarks at the 2010 Institute of International Finance Annual Membership Meeting, Washington, D.C.
Journal Article
Going private
Working Paper
The co-evolution of the real and financial sectors in the growth process
We produce a theoretical framework that helps explain the co-evolution of the real and financial sectors of an economy in the growth process, as described by Gurley and Shaw. According to them, self-financed capital investment first gives way to debt finance and later to the emergence of equity as an additional instrument for raising funds externally. As the economy develops further, the aggregate ratio of debt to equity will generally fall. We analyze that portion of their account concerning the evolution of equity markets. We show that in an important sense, debt and equity are ...
Working Paper
The use of debt and equity in optimal financial contracts
We consider an environment in which risk-neutral firms must obtain external finance. They have access to two kinds of linear, stochastic investment opportunities. For one, return realizations are costlessly observed by all agents. For the other, return realizations are costlessly observed only by the investing firm; however, they can be (privately) observed by outsiders who bear a fixed verification cost. Thus, the second investment opportunity is subject to a standard costly state verification (CSV) problem of the type considered by Townsend (1979), Gale and Hellwig (1985), or Williamson ...