RCFS News

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), with over $500 billion distributed over a few months in 2020, was one of the largest stimulus programs in U.S. history. The program was created to help “small businesses” survive the COVID-19 shock. However, in a forthcoming RCFS paper, “Public Firm Borrowers of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program,” Anna Cororaton and Samuel Rosen document that nearly half of U.S. public firms were eligible for the… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Public Firm Borrowers of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program

Risk taking by banks has been discussed extensively by researchers and policy makers for many years, even preceding the Great Recession. Literature has focused on two mechanisms that alter banks’ risk-taking behavior: higher regulatory capital ratios and higher competition due to bank deregulation. But, how does a bank’s equity capital ratio interact with banking competition in their impact on risk taking? In a forthcoming RCFS paper, “Effect of the Equity Capital… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Effect of the Equity Capital Ratio on the Relationship between Competition and Bank Risk-Taking Behavior

              Leveraged buyouts by private equity funds have been a constant, and growing, phenomenon in corporate finance over the last two decades and their importance is likely to increase in the post-COVID world. Empirical literature on this subject has explored various angles, but one unanswered question is whether the high leverage used in private equity (PE) buyout transactions contributes to the disproportionately high default… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Private Equity and the Resolution of Financial Distress

“Corporate Transactions in Hard-to-Value Stocks” by Itzhak Ben-David, Byungwook Kim, Hala Moussawi, and Darren Roulstone

“Sharing R&D Risk in Healthcare via FDA Hedges” by Adam Jorring, Andrew Lo, Tomas J. Philipson, Manita Singh, and Richard T. Thakor “Information asymmetry, financial intermediation, and wealth effects of project finance loans” by Andrew Ferguson and Peter Lam

Despite the large theoretical literature that asserts the importance of taxes on corporate investment and financing decisions, the empirical literature often fails to demonstrate the effects of taxes in a convincing way. One reason for the discrepancy could be measurement error in variables. In “The Effect of Taxation on Corporate Financing and Investment,” Hong Chen and Murray Z. Frank take issue with the theoretical predictions themselves. They construct a model… Read More »Paper Spotlight: The Effect of Taxation on Corporate Financing and Investment

“P2P Lenders versus Banks: Cream Skimming or Bottom Fishing?” by Calebe DeRoure, Loriana Pelizzon, and Anjan V. Thakor

The Editor’s Choice paper for issue 10(3) is “Skilled Labor Risk and Corporate Policies” by Yue Qiu and Tracy Yue Wang. You can read the paper free online.