This paper studies the impact of political risk on exchange rates. We focus on the Brexit Referendum as it provides a natural experiment where both exchange rate expectations and a time-varying political risk factor can be measured directly. We build a simple portfolio model which predicts that an increase in the Leave probability triggers a depreciation of the British Pound, both on account of exchange rate expectations and of political risk. We estimate the model for multilateral and bilateral British Pound exchange rates. The results confirm the model's main implications. When we extend the analysis to a portfolio model of multiple currencies, we find that the cross-currencies restrictions implied by the theory are not rejected by our system estimation. Moreover, the joint estimates of the multi-currency model in the presence of time-varying political risk premium are in many cases consistent with the Uncovered Interest Parity.
Donaldson, Gromb and Piacentino (2019) suggest that, in the presence of limited commitment, increasing the fraction of a firm's cash flows that can be pledged as collateral might make the firm worse off. We show that, in fact, firms can never be hurt by increased pledgeability of cash flows in their framework. We then show that the first best can always be implemented by non-state contingent collateralized debt contracts that differ from the ones they consider.
We consider a model of external financing under ex ante asymmetric information and profit manipulation (non verifiability). Contrary to conventional wisdom, the optimal contract is not standard debt, and it is not monotonic. Instead, it resembles a contingent convertible (CoCo) bond. In particular: (i) if the profit manipulation and/or adverse selection are not severe, there exists a unique separating equilibrium in CoCos; (ii) in the intermediate region, if the distribution of earnings is unbounded above there exists a unique pooling equilibrium in CoCos, otherwise debt might be issued but it is never the unique equilibrium; (iii) finally, if profit manipulation is severe, there is no financing.These findings suggest that the standard monotonicity constraint exogenously imposed in the security design literature must be reconsidered. Crucially, profit manipulation is part of the optimal contract, and non-monotonic, convertible securities mitigate the asymmetric information problem. We discuss milestone payments in venture capital as an application.
Firms seeking external financing jointly choose what securities to issue, and the extent of their disclosure commitments. The literature shows that enhanced disclosure reduces the cost of financing. This paper analyses how disclosure affects the optimal composition of financing means. It considers a market where firms compete for external financing under costly-state-verification, but, in contrast to the standard model: (i) the degree of asymmetric information between firms and outside investors is variable, and (ii) firms can affect it through a disclosure policy, modeled as a verifiable signal with a cost decreasing in its noise component. Two central predictions emerge.On the positive side, optimal disclosure and leverage are negatively correlated. Efficient equity financing requires that firms are sufficiently transparent, whereas debt does not; it solely relies on the threat of bankruptcy and liquidation. Therefore, more transparent firms issue cheaper equity and face a higher opportunity cost of leveraged external financing. The prediction is shown to be consistent with the behavior of US corporations since the 1980s.On the normative side, disclosure externalities and time inconsistencies lead to under-disclosure and excessive leverage relative to the constrained best. If mandatory disclosures are feasible -that is, they cannot be easily dodged -they increase welfare. Otherwise, endogenously higher transparency can be triggered if regulators set capital requirements. Capital regulation proves especially useful when (i) firm performances are highly correlated, and (ii) disclosure requirements can be easily dodged -conditions that seem to apply to large financial firms. The view of capital standards as a means to improve the information environment is novel in the literature; its policy implications and challenges are discussed.
We consider a model of external financing under ex ante asymmetric information and profit manipulation (non verifiability). Contrary to conventional wisdom, the optimal contract is not standard debt, and it is not monotonic. Instead, it resembles a contingent convertible (CoCo) bond. In particular: (i) if the profit manipulation and/or adverse selection are not severe, there exists a unique separating equilibrium in CoCos; (ii) in the intermediate region, if the distribution of earnings is unbounded above there exists a unique pooling equilibrium in CoCos, otherwise debt might be issued but it is never the unique equilibrium; (iii) finally, if profit manipulation is severe, there is no financing. These findings suggest that the standard monotonicity constraint exogenously imposed in the security design literature must be reconsidered. Crucially, profit manipulation is part of the optimal contract, and non-monotonic, convertible securities mitigate the asymmetric information problem. We discuss milestone payments in venture capital as an application.
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