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- August 2022
- Case
Boston Impact Initiative: Investing in Local Change
By: Emily R. McComb, Amy Klopfenstein and Mel Martin
In fall 2021, Aliana Piñeiro, impact director at Boston Impact Initiative (BII) discovered that an entrepreneur the organization was considering for an investment had failed to disclose pre-existing debt with another lender. Although the business scored highly on BII’s...
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Keywords:
Entrepreneurship;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Finance;
Investment;
Investment Funds;
Investment Portfolio;
Relationships;
Business and Community Relations;
Society;
Social Issues;
Wealth and Poverty;
Wealth;
Poverty;
Risk Management;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
Massachusetts;
Boston
- 2022
- Article
Regulatory Treatment of Changes in Fair Value and the Composition of Banks' Investment Portfolios
By: Michael Iselin, Jung Koo Kang and Joshua Madsen
In their implementation of Basel III, U.S. bank regulators are again including changes in the fair value of available-for-sale (AFS) debt securities in Tier 1 capital, but only for the largest U.S. banks. This paper investigates a potential impact of expanding this...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
A Conceptualization of Sub-Living Wages: Liabilities, Leverage, and Risk
By: Drew Keller, Katie Panella and George Serafeim
Currently the accounting system records employee wages as an expense in the income statement. However, paying below living wages can expose an organization to reputational and operational risks. In this paper, we offer an alternative conceptualization of the issue of...
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- June 2022
- Case
South Africa – a 'Just Energy Transition'
By: Richard Vietor
South Africa, like most other countries, is in the process of reducing its carbon emissions to comply with COP26 and, hopefully, reach net zero emissions by 2050. However, because South Africa relies almost wholly on coal (93%) for electricity, and on coal for...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of Minority Representation at Mortgage Lenders
By: W. Scott Frame, Ruidi Huang, Erik J. Mayer and Adi Sunderam
We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Minority...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Distributional Consequences of Monetary Policy Across Races: Evidence from the U.S. Credit Register
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia and Camelia Minoiu
We examine the consequences of monetary policy on racial disparities, focusing on the role of bank lending to firms through collateral and selection channels. Leveraging comprehensive loan-level data from the U.S. credit register (Y-14Q) of the Federal Reserve, we show...
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- Article
Undisclosed Debt Sustainability
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Over the past decade, non-Paris Club creditors, notably China, have become an important source of financing for low- and middle-income countries. In contrast with typical sovereign debt, these lending arrangements are not public, and other creditors have no information...
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- April 2022
- Supplement
PG&E and the First Climate Change Bankruptcy
By: Stuart C. Gilson
- March 2022
- Article
Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps
By: Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth
Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries. In these credit markets, borrowers and lenders often bargain over not only the interest rate but also implicit restrictions on types of investment. We...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
High-Yield Debt Covenants and Their Real Effects
By: Falk Bräuning, Victoria Ivashina and Ali Ozdagli
High-yield debt including leveraged loans is characterized by incurrence financial covenants, or “cov-lite” provisions. A traditional loan agreement includes maintenance covenants, which require continuous compliance with the covenant threshold, and their violation...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Gone with the Big Data: Institutional Lender Demand for Private Information
By: Jung Koo Kang
I explore whether the value of borrowers’ private information is an important determinant of institutional lender participation in syndicated loans. Institutional lenders have been shown to exploit their access to borrowers’ private information by trading on it in...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Transformation of Self Employment
By: Innessa Colaiacovo, Margaret Dalton, Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to...
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- February 2022
- Article
Borrowing to Save? The Impact of Automatic Enrollment on Debt
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and William L. Skimmyhorn
Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase financial distress due to increased borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan....
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Calling All Issuers: The Market for Debt Monitoring
By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen and Weiling Liu
A substantial fraction of local governments refinance their long-term debt with significant delays—resulting in sizable losses. Using data from 2001 to 2018, we estimate that U.S. municipals lost over $31 billion from this delayed refinancing, whereas the entire U.S....
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- January 2022
- Technical Note
Introduction to Capital Structure Analytics
By: Samuel Antill and Ted Berk
This technical note provides an overview of key analytical approaches that are useful in assessing the appropriateness of a firm’s capital structure and funding plan. This note introduces basic quantitative tools and metrics that are commonly used as inputs to this...
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- November 2021 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
The Global Great Depression, 1929-1939
By: Alberto Cavallo, Sophus A. Reinert and Federica Gabrieli
The Great Depression was, by far, the worst economic contraction of the twentieth century, and some of the most important ideas about both fiscal and monetary policy in the second half of the century were developed in response to it. The economic collapse, which...
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- November 2021 (Revised January 2022)
- Case
Scott Tucker (A): Race to the Top
By: Aiyesha Dey and Amram Migdal
The case tells the story of the rise and fall of Scott Tucker, an entrepreneur, businessman, passionate race car driver, competitor, and owner of a professional racing team. From 1997 to 2012, Tucker built a nationwide network of payday lending businesses, becoming a...
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- November 2021 (Revised January 2021)
- Supplement
Scott Tucker (B): The Feds Catch Up
By: Aiyesha Dey and Amram Migdal
The case tells the story of the rise and fall of Scott Tucker, an entrepreneur, businessman, passionate race car driver, competitor, and owner of a professional racing team. From 1997 to 2012, Tucker built a nationwide network of payday lending businesses, becoming a...
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- November 2021
- Article
Borrower Leakage from Costly Screening: Evidence from SME Lending in Peru
By: Irani Arraiz, Miriam Bruhn, Benjamin N. Roth, Claudia Ruiz-Ortega and Rodolfo Stucchi
We provide evidence that commercial lenders in Peru suffer leakages in their loan approval process. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan approval process of a large bank, we find that receiving a loan approval from the bank causes loan applicants to receive offers...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Transitory and Permanent Cash Flow Shocks in Debt Contract Design
By: Le Ma, Anywhere Sikochi and Yajun Xiao
We examine how lenders design contracts when borrowers are exposed to volatile transitory or permanent cash flow shocks. We find that volatile transitory shocks are associated with fewer liquidity covenants, indicating financial flexibility that can enable firms to...
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