IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedcwp/9505.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Debt and equity as optimal contracts

Author

Abstract

Using a principal-agent model in which an entrepreneur has an investment project whose returns depend on his effort, which is not observable by the financier, the author shows that the optimal contract used to finance such a project can be replicated by a unique combination of debt and equity, proving the optimality of these financial instruments. ; A look at the evolution of the collection, clearinghouse, and regulatory provisions of the Federal Reserve Act. The Reserve Banks? check collection service was designed in 1913 to serve as \"glue,\" attaching the new central bank to the commercial and financial markets through member banks.

Suggested Citation

  • João A. C. Santos, 1995. "Debt and equity as optimal contracts," Working Papers (Old Series) 9505, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwp:9505
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?item_id=494626&filepath=/docs/historical/frbclev/wp/frbclv_wp1995-05.pdf#scribd-open
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Rogerson, William P, 1985. "The First-Order Approach to Principal-Agent Problems," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 53(6), pages 1357-1367, November.
    2. Oliver Hart & John Moore, 1998. "Default and Renegotiation: A Dynamic Model of Debt," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 113(1), pages 1-41.
    3. Prowse, Stephen D., 1990. "Institutional investment patterns and corporate financial behavior in the United States and Japan," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 43-66, September.
    4. Allen, Franklin & Gale, Douglas, 1992. "Measurement Distortion and Missing Contingencies in Optimal Contracts," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 2(1), pages 1-26, January.
    5. Douglas W. Diamond, 1984. "Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 51(3), pages 393-414.
    6. Grossman, Sanford J. & Hart, Oliver D., 1988. "One share-one vote and the market for corporate control," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1-2), pages 175-202, January.
    7. Townsend, Robert M., 1979. "Optimal contracts and competitive markets with costly state verification," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 265-293, October.
    8. Bengt Holmstrom, 1979. "Moral Hazard and Observability," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 10(1), pages 74-91, Spring.
    9. Douglas Gale & Martin Hellwig, 1985. "Incentive-Compatible Debt Contracts: The One-Period Problem," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 52(4), pages 647-663.
    10. Jewitt, Ian, 1988. "Justifying the First-Order Approach to Principal-Agent Problems," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(5), pages 1177-1190, September.
    11. Chang, Chun, 1999. "Capital structure as optimal contracts," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 363-385.
    12. Cable, John R, 1985. "Capital Market Information and Industrial Performance: The Role of West German Banks," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 95(377), pages 118-132, March.
    13. J. A. Mirrlees, 1999. "The Theory of Moral Hazard and Unobservable Behaviour: Part I," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 66(1), pages 3-21.
    14. Flath, David, 1993. "Shareholding in the Keiretsu, Japan's Financial Groups," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(2), pages 249-257, May.
    15. Douglas W. Diamond, 1991. "Debt Maturity Structure and Liquidity Risk," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 106(3), pages 709-737.
    16. Harris, Milton & Raviv, Artur, 1988. "Corporate governance : Voting rights and majority rules," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1-2), pages 203-235, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Elijah Brewer & Hesna Genay & William E. Jackson & Paula R. Worthington, 1996. "How are small firms financed? Evidence from small business investment companies," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, vol. 20(Nov), pages 2-18.
    2. John Krainer, 2000. "The separation of banking and commerce," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, pages 15-24.
    3. Santos, Joao A. C., 1999. "Bank capital and equity investment regulations," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 23(7), pages 1095-1120, July.
    4. Rebecca M. Neumann, 2003. "International capital flows under asymmetric information and costly monitoring: implications of debt and equity financing," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 36(3), pages 674-700, August.
    5. Neumann, Rebecca M., 2006. "The effects of capital controls on international capital flows in the presence of asymmetric information," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(6), pages 1010-1027, October.
    6. Ben R. Craig, 1996. "Competing currencies: back to the future?," Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, issue Oct.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1997. "A Survey of Corporate Governance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(2), pages 737-783, June.
    2. João Pinto & Mário Coutinho dos Santos, 2014. "Corporate Financing Choices after the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis," Working Papers de Economia (Economics Working Papers) 03, Católica Porto Business School, Universidade Católica Portuguesa.
    3. Mathias Dewatripont & Patrick Legros & Steven A. Matthews, 2003. "Moral Hazard and Capital Structure Dynamics," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 1(4), pages 890-930, June.
    4. Fluck, Zsuzsanna, 1999. "The Dynamics of the Management-Shareholder Conflict," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(2), pages 379-404.
    5. Goergen, Marc & Manjon, Miguel C. & Renneboog, Luc, 2008. "Recent developments in German corporate governance," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 175-193, September.
    6. Clausen, Andrew, 2013. "Moral Hazard with Counterfeit Signals," SIRE Discussion Papers 2013-13, Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE).
    7. Lang, Matthias, 2019. "Communicating subjective evaluations," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 179(C), pages 163-199.
    8. Ghossoub, Mario, 2010. "Supplement to "Belief heterogeneity in the Arrow-Borch-Raviv insurance model"," MPRA Paper 37717, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 22 Mar 2012.
    9. Hege, U. & Viala, P., 1997. "Contentious Contracts," Discussion Paper 1997-109, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
    10. Franklin Allen & Xian Gu & Oskar Kowalewski, 2017. "Financial structure, economic growth and development," Post-Print hal-01917114, HAL.
    11. Grenadier, Steven R. & Wang, Neng, 2005. "Investment timing, agency, and information," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(3), pages 493-533, March.
    12. Langberg, Nisan, 2008. "Optimal financing for growth firms," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 379-406, July.
    13. Mario Tirelli, 2017. "Optimal Financial Contracts With Unobservable Investments," Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' 0230, Department of Economics - University Roma Tre.
    14. Stein, Jeremy C., 2003. "Agency, information and corporate investment," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 2, pages 111-165, Elsevier.
    15. Eduard Marinov, 2016. "The 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics," Economic Thought journal, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - Economic Research Institute, issue 6, pages 97-149.
    16. William R. Emmons & Frank A. Schmid, 1998. "Universal banking, control rights, and corporate finance in Germany," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Jul, pages 19-42.
    17. Dang, Viet Anh, 2010. "Optimal financial contracts with hidden effort, unobservable profits and endogenous costs of effort," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 75-89, February.
    18. Santos, Joao A.C. & Rumble, Adrienne S., 2006. "The American keiretsu and universal banks: Investing, voting and sitting on nonfinancials' corporate boards," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(2), pages 419-454, May.
    19. Demirgüç-Kunt, Asli & Horváth, Bálint L. & Huizinga, Harry, 2017. "How does long-term finance affect economic volatility?," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 41-59.
    20. Scheepens, J.P.J.F., 1993. "Bankruptcy litigation and optimal debt contracts," Other publications TiSEM 64e785e4-4101-4604-a392-3, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Contracts; Corporations - Finance;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwp:9505. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: 4D Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbclus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.