I study the implications of various bankruptcy regimes for student loans on college investment, human capital accumulation, and earnings in a heterogeneous life-cycle economy with risky human capital investment. The option to discharge one’s debt under a liquidation regime helps alleviate some of the risk of investing in human capital. However, dischargeability triggers exclusion from borrowing...

In this paper we demonstrate an inherent con‡ict that can arise in a …rm between inducing ex ante e¢ cient monitoring and liquidation decisions by outside claimholders. This tension arises because the choice of liquidation decision when …rm prospects are uncertain will in‡uence incentives for monitoring to produce information about …rm prospects. We show that when high levels of outside monitor...

This paper deals with numerical solutions to an impulse control problem arising from optimal portfolio liquidation with bid-ask spread and market price impact penalizing speedy execution trades. The corresponding dynamic programming (DP) equation is a quasi-variational inequality (QVI) with solvency constraint satisfied by the value function in the sense of constrained viscosity solutions. By t...

We develop a model in which cash-constrained entrepreneurs seek a venture capitalist (VC) to finance a new firm. Costly monitoring is employed by VCs to reduce entrepreneurial moral hazard. When monitoring reveals poor performance, VCs want to punish the entrepreneur with liquidation. However, when assets are specific and liquidation would lead to a loss, VCs choose to renegotiate the terms of ...

We study optimal dynamic financial contracts between a lender and a borrower in the presence of costly state verification. The efficient contract is such that (1) interim monitoring can prevent future inefficient liquidation of investment projects that are due to informational asymmetries and (2) two levels of bankruptcy can be distinguished, one that leads to monitoring and the other that lead...

1Division of Accounting, School of Business, NanyangBusiness School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 2Leventhal School of Accounting,Marshall School of Business, University of SouthernCalifornia, USA Correspondence Clive Lennox, Leventhal School ofAccounting, Marshall School ofBusiness,University of SouthernCalifornia, 3670TrousdaleParkway, Los Angeles,CA90089,USA. Email: clennox@us...

We establish existence, uniqueness and regularity of solution results for a class of backward stochastic partial differential equations with singular terminal condition. The equation describes the value function of non-Markovian stochastic optimal control problem in which the terminal state of the controlled process is pre-specified. The analysis of such control problems is motivated by models ...

The optimal outcome of a firm in bankruptcy is to liquidate if its asset value is greater than its value as a going concern or, alternatively, to reorganize if it is worth more as a going concern. In this study, we identify firm asset and liability characteristics which may determine the likelihood of a firm successfully emerging from bankruptcy. We find two key factors influencing the success ...

We consider the infinite time-horizon optimal basket portfolio liquidation problem for a von NeumannMorgenstern investor in a multi-asset extension of the liquidity model of Almgren (2003) with cross-asset impact. Using a stochastic control approach, we establish a “separation theorem”: the sequence of portfolios held during an optimal liquidation depends only on the (co-)variance and (cross-as...