Thesis advisor: Philip Strahan / In my first essay, I study how the rise of non-bank loan investment from CLOs, mutual funds, and hedge funds influenced contracting relationships between firms and their senior lenders. Contrary to common perception that non-bank investors diluted the incentive for banks to monitor firms, I find evidence that bank underwriters embraced tighter contracts to mitigate agency and holdout problems associated with less-informed and dispersed non-bank investors. While recent studies show that non-bank loan investors lowered the cost and expanded the availability of capital ex ante, I conclude that tighter contracts also assigned stronger control rights to lenders and imposed higher renegotiation costs to firms ex post. In my second essay, we examine the drivers of M&A activity in bankruptcy. M&A in bankruptcy is counter-cyclical, and is more likely when the costs of financing a reorganization are greater than financing costs to a potential acquirer. Consistent with a senior creditor liquidation bias, the greater use of secured debt leads to more sales in bankruptcy - but, this result holds only for sales that preserve going concern value. We also show that overall creditor recovery rates are higher, and unsecured creditor recoveries and post-bankruptcy survival rates are not different, when bankrupt firms sell businesses as going concerns. Finally, in my third essay, we examine whether corporate credit rating analysts are rewarded based on ratings accuracy or bias. Overall, accurate analysts are more likely to be promoted. However, analysts who disproportionately downgrade firms compared to the corresponding S&P rating are less likely to be promoted despite being more accurate than analysts who disproportionately upgrade firms. Further, analysts whose rating decisions lead to significantly negative announcement returns are also less likely to be promoted. We conclude that Moody's rewards accurate analysts but punishes analysts for negative bias. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

This thesis demonstrates that consumer leverage can contribute to financial crises such as the subprime mortgage crisis characterised by increased bankruptcy prospects and tightened credit access. A recession may follow even when the leveraged sector is not a production sector and can be triggered by seeming positive events such as a technological innovation and a relaxation of borrowing conditions. The first preliminary chapter updates the Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) approach with financial frictions in the production sector to a two-sector model with consumption and housing. It shows that credit frictions in the capital financing decisions of housing firms are not sufficient to capture the negative consumer experience with falling housing prices and relaxed credit access during the recession. The second chapter brings the model closer to the subprime mortgage crisis by shifting credit constraints to the consumer mortgage market. Increased supply of houses lowers asset prices and reduces the value of the real estate collateral used in the mortgage which in turn worsens the leverage of indebted consumers. A relaxation of borrowing conditions turns credit-constrained households into a potential source of disturbances themselves when market optimism allows them to raise their leverage with little downpayment. Both cases demonstrate that although households are not production agents, their worsening debt levels can trigger a lasting financial downturn. The third chapter develops a chained mortgage contracts model where both homeowner consumers and the financial institutions that securitize their mortgage loan are credit-constrained. Adding credit constraints to the financial sector that provides housing mortgages creates opportunities for risk sharing where banks shift some of the downturn onto indebted consumers in order to hasten their own recovery. This consequence is especially evident in the case of relaxed credit access for banks. Financial institutions repair their debt position relatively fast at the expense of consumers whose borrowing ability is squeezed for a long period despite the fact that they may not be the source of the disturbance. The result mirrors the recent subprime mortgage crisis characterised by a sharp but brief decline for banks and a protracted recovery for mortgaged households.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-03-14T17:42:36Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Bruna Simões França.pdf: 1589211 bytes, checksum: 1dad341b5fa496abdfccbc2de400367a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-03-14T17:42:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bruna Simões França.pdf: 1589211 bytes, checksum: 1dad341b5fa496abdfccbc2de400367a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-02-20 / The propose of this work is to analyze the right that the right that consumers have to be oriented and informed and the consequences of this right is not observed by the financial institutions especially in loan contracts and considering the vulnerability of the consumers. We will begin doing an explanation of the legal regime of the financial institutions on Brazilian Constitution, the Central Bank and the Monetary Authority, as well as the possibility for self-regulation. Then we will analyze the legal protection of the consumer in Brazil, with main focus on the information right. We will study the concept of good faith in legal terms and the responsibility of financial institutions in abusive loan contracts regarding consumers. There will be a highlight on de vulnerability of the consumer and de concept of consumers that are more vulnerable than others. This paper intends to demonstrate that loan contracts sign with disregard of the information right by the financial institution to not oblige the consumer. As a consequence of this violation, the contract should be considered as not valid and the parties involved must return to the previously situation / O objetivo deste trabalho será analisar o papel do direito à informação do consumidor e do dever de educação do fornecedor e a responsabilidade jurídica que as instituições financeiras possuem nos contratos de mútuo bancário no direito brasileiro, especialmente considerando a vulnerabilidade do consumidor. Iniciaremos fazendo uma explanação do regime jurídico das instituições financeiras na Constituição Federal, no Brasil pelo Banco Central e Conselho Monetário Nacional, bem como a possibilidade de autorregulação de suas atividades. Após, trataremos da proteção jurídica do consumidor, especialmente o direito à informação. Será analisado ainda o conceito de boa-fé objetiva, bem como a responsabilidade dos fornecedores nos contratos de mútuo no que tange aos consumidores. Neste ponto, serão destacados a vulnerabilidade do consumidor e o conceito de consumidores hipervulneráveis. Este trabalho pretende demonstrar que os contratos de mútuo celebrados com desrespeito ao dever de informação por parte do fornecedor não vinculam o consumidor. Como consequência desta violação, o contrato deverá ser considerado nulo e, assim, as partes deverão voltar ao status quo anterior à celebração do contrato

We present three chapters on theoretical issues of banking. These deal with bank runs, risk sharing, lending and profitability. In the first chapter, we examine the agency problem in the bank-depositor relationship. Depositors are the principals and banks are the agents. Banks choose investment portfolios and are subject to moral hazard in that they have incentive to take on more risk than desirable to depositors because they are residual claimants. We study an incentive-compatible mechanism that prompts banks to follow a safe investment policy. This mechanism leaves the bank a profit margin in a similar manner to a CEO being paid a bonus by a company. In the second chapter, we extend Allen and Gale (1998) by adding a long-term riskless investment opportunity to the original portfolio of a short-term liquid asset and a long-term risky illiquid asset. Through portfolio diversification, we identify the risk-sharing deposit contract in a three-period model that maximizes the ex-ante expected utility of depositors. Unlike Allen and Gale, there are no information-based bank runs in equilibrium. In addition, our model can improve consumers' welfare over the Allen and Gale model. I also show that the bank will choose to liquidate the cheaper investments, in terms of the gain-loss ratios for the two types of existing long-term assets, when there is liquidity shortage in some cases. Such a policy reduces the liquidation cost and enables the bank to meet the outstanding liability to depositors without large liquidation losses. In the third chapter, we study the role of banks in providing loans to borrower firms. This paper extends the theory of designing optimal loan contracts (for profits) in the Bolton and Scharfstein (1996) model to a setting where asymmetry of information exists. Based on the verifiability of information structure, we analyze complete and incomplete contracts. Through this analysis, optimal, incentive-compatible loan contracts that maximize the expected profit of the bank are characterized. Our analysis suggests that a bank could be induced to liquidate a borrower's project under specific conditions. Furthermore, we identify implementable mechanisms for the renegotiation game given the bargaining power between a borrower and a bank.