Working papers results

We develop a theory of corporate boards and their role in forcing CEO turnover. We consider a firm with an incumbent CEO of uncertain management ability and a board consisting of a number of directors whose role is to evaluate the CEO and fire her if a better replacement can be found. Each board member receives an independent private signal about the CEO's ability, after which board members vote on firing the CEO (or not). If the CEO is fired, the board hires a new CEO from the pool of candidates available. The true ability of the rm's CEO is revealed in the long run; the firm's long-run share price is determined by this ability. Each board member owns some equity in the firm, and thus prefers to fire a CEO of poor ability. However, if a board member votes to fire the incumbent CEO but the number of other board members also voting to fire her is not enough to successfully oust her, the CEO can impose significant costs of dissent on him. In this setting, we show that the board faces a coordination problem, leading it to retain an incompetent CEO even when a majority of board members receive private signals indicating that she is of poor quality. We solve for the optimal board size, and show that it depends on various board and rm characteristics: one size does not fit all firms. We develop extensions to our basic model to analyze the optimal composition of the board between firm insiders and outsiders and the effect of board members observing imprecise public signals in addition to their private signals on board decision-making. Finally, we develop a dynamic extension to our basic model to analyze why many boards do not fire CEOs even when they preside over a signi cant, publicly observable, reduction in shareholder wealth over a long period of time. We use this dynamic model to distinguish between the characteristics of such boards from those that fire bad CEOs proactively, before significant shareholder wealth reductions take place.

We investigate the role of government-provided loans on market outcomes. First, we show that government-provided financing can lead to asset bubbles when enough households have adaptive expectations and determine the minimum share of households with adaptive expectation that is sufficient for bubbles to arise. Second, we show that in addition to causing bubbles government-provided loans can generate a propagation mechanism behind them. Third, we show that bubbles can be avoided if financing is provided over a sufficiently large number of periods rather than all at once, even when households have adaptive expectations.

I examine the role of third-party debt collectors in consumer credit markets. Using law enforcement as an instrument for the number of debt collectors, I find that higher density of debt collectors increases the supply of unsecured credit. The estimated elasticity of the average credit card balance with respect to the number of debt collectors per capita is 0.49, the elasticity of the average balance on non-credit card unsecured loans with respect to the number of debt collectors per capita is 1.32. I also find evidence that creditors substitute unsecured credit for secured credit when the number of debt collectors increases. Higher density of debt collectors improves recoveries, which enables lenders to extend morecredit. Finally, creditors charge higher interest rates and lend to a larger pool of borrowers when the density of debt collectors increases, presumably because better collections enable them to extend credit to riskier applicants.

In this paper, we show that secondary buyouts (SBOs) do not generate a signifi...cant improvement in the operating performance of target companies. We collect deal-level infor mation on 2,911 buyouts between 1998 and 2008 and gather detailed firm-level financial and accounting information on 163 companies targeted by two consecutive leveraged acquisitions in the period 1998-2008. We show that ...first-round buyers generate a large and signi...cant ab normal improvement in operating performance and efficiency. In contrast, SBO investors do not show statistically signi...cant evidence of incremental contribution to the performance oftarget companies whereas they increasing leverage and squeeze-out. Returns to PE investors are signifi...cantly lower in secondary transactions and are mostly determined by large dividend payments. Market-wide SBO activity is signifi...cantly determined by favorable debt market conditions and PE reputation. Additionally, large and high-value deals are more likely to be exited through an SBO. We test a possible collusive motive for this class of deals, fo...nding some support for this conjecture.

We use response time (RT) and behavioral data from two different but related games to test the hypothesis that individuals use introspection when confronted with a new strategic situation. Our results confirm that the need to reflect about the possible behavior of the other player (interactive thought) has an important role in the mental processes present in strategic interactions. We also find that players with longer response times have distributions of behavior that are more dispersed than for faster players. This suggests that the longest RTs across games correspond to thought dedicated to the resolution of moral dilemmas and not to guessing the likely behavior of other players in order to maximize own payoff.

This paper estimates the impact of longevity risk on pension systems by combining the prediction based on a Lee-Carter (1992) mortality model with the projected pension payments for different cohorts of retirees. We measure longevity risk by the difference between the upper bound of the total old-age pension expense and its mean estimate. This difference is as high as 4 per cent of annual GDP over the period 2040-2050. The impact of longevity risk is sizeably reduced by the introduction of indexation of retirement age to expected life at retirement. Our evidence speaks in favour of a market for longevity risk and calls for a closer scrutiny of the potential redistributive effects of longevity risk.

We develop a new theory of delegated investment whereby managers compete in terms of composition of the portfolios they promise to acquire. We study the resulting asset pricing in the inter-manager market. We incentivize investors so that we obtain sharp predictions. Managers are paid a fixed fraction of fund size. In equilibrium, investors choose managers who offer portfolios that mimic Arrow-Debreu (state) securities. Prices in the inter-manager market are predicted to satisfy a weak version of the CAPM: state-price probability ratios implicit in prices of traded assets decrease in aggregate wealth across states. An experiment involving about one hundred participants over six weeks broadly supports the theoretical predictions. Pricing quality declines, however, when fund concentration increases because funds flow towards managers who offer portfolios closer to Arrow-Debreu securities (as in the theory) and who had better recent performance (an observation unrelated to the theory).

We propose a simple theory of predatory pricing, based on incumbency advantages, scale economies and sequential buyers (or markets). The prey needs to reach a critical scale to be successful. The incumbent (or predator) has an initial advantage and is ready to make losses on earlier buyers so as to deprive the prey of the scale the latter needs, thus making monopoly profits on later buyers. Several extensions are considered, including cases where scale economies exist because of demand externalities or two-sided market e ects, and where markets are characterized by common costs. Conditions under which predation may (or not) take place in actual cases are also discussed.

This paper estimates the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on workers' individual wages in a quasi-experimental setting, exploiting a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees and left firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. Accounting for the endogeneity of the treatment status, we find that the slight average wage reduction (between -0:4 and -0:1 percent) that follows the increase in EPL hides highly heterogeneous effects. Workers who change firm during the reform period suffer a in the entry wage, while incumbent workers are left unaffected. Results also indicate that the negative wage effect of the EPL reform is stronger on young blue collars and on workers at the low-end of the wage distribution. Finally, workers in low-employment regions suffer higher wage reductions after the reform. This pattern suggests that the ability of the employers to shift EPL costs onto wages depends on workers' and firms' relative bargaining power.

The effects of public debt and redistribution are intimately related. We illustrate this in a model with heterogenous agents and imperfect credit markets. Our setup differs from the classic Savers-Spenders model of fiscal policy in that all agents engage in intertemporal optimization, but a fraction of them is subject to a borrowing limit. We show that, despite the credit frictions, Ricardian equivalence holds under flexible prices if the steady-state distribution of wealth is degenerate: income effects on labor supply deriving from a tax redistribution are entirely symmetric across agents. When the distribution of wealth is non-degenerate, a tax cut is, somewhat paradoxically, contractionary. Conversely, sticky prices generate empirically plausible deviations from Ricardian equivalence, even in the case of degenerate wealth distribution. A revenue-neutral redistribution from unconstrained to constrained agents is expansionary, while debt...nanced tax cuts have effects that go beyond their redistributional component: the present-value multiplier of a tax cut is positive due to an interplay of intertemporal substitution by those who hold the public debt and income effects on those who do not.