While the theoretical literature strongly argues in favor of ratchets (anti-dilution protections) and liquidation rights, recent empirical studies documented limits in their use. This paper studies firms’ financing constraints in a model of staged venture capital financing where new-money raised and post-money values evolve randomly over time. Our analysis reveals that ventures fail if new mone...

Momentum is the notion that an asset that has performed well in the past will continue to do so for some period. We study the optimal liquidation strategy for a momentum trade in a setting where the drift of the asset drops from a high value to a smaller one at some random change-point. This change-point is not directly observable for the trader, but it is partially observable in the sense that...

We extend the contingent claims framework for the levered firm in explicitly modeling the resolution of financial distress under formal bankruptcy as a non-cooperative game between claimants under the supervision of the bankruptcy judge. The identity of the class of claimants proposing the first reorganization plan is found to be a key determinant of the likelihood of liquidation and of the ren...

We study the investment analyses of 67 portfolio investments by 11 venture capital (VC) firms. VCs describe the strengths and risks of the investments as well as expected postinvestment actions. We classify the risks into three categories and relate them to the allocation of cash flow rights, contingencies, control rights, and liquidation rights between VCs and entrepreneurs. The risk results s...

This paper unifies the recent analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations of [Brunnermeier and Sannikov(2012)], in which firms subject to financing constraints can sell capital in order to avoid liquidation, with the earlier related paper of [Milne and Robertson(1996)], in which firms manage cash flow, output and investment decisions in order to lower the probability of liquidation. This yields more...

We consider the execution of portfolio transactions with the aim of minimizing a combination of volatility risk and transaction costs arising from permanent and temporary market impact. For a simple linear cost model, we explicitly construct the efficient frontier in the space of time-dependent liquidation strategies, which have minimum expected cost for a given level of uncertainty. We may the...

We analyze optimal financial contracts when the specificity of investments is endogenous. Specialization decreases the liquidation value of assets, but improves the asset’s long-term productivity. While the former is known to make financing more difficult, we show that the latter can ease financing constraints and increase financing capacity by improving an entrepreneur’s incentive to repay. Th...

This problem, which I call the Scholes liquidation problem, is ubiquitous during unstable financial periods. Indeed, in the recent financial crisis, banks incurred large losses during the forced contraction of their balance sheets, as access to short-term financing through repo markets dried up (e.g., Adrian and Shin 2008; Brunnermeier 2009). A systemic deleveraging process propagated through t...