Agency conflicts in financial contracting with applications to venture capital and CDO markets

In these papers I examine efficient financial contracting when incentive problems play a significant role. In the first chapter (joint with Z. Fluck and S. Myers) we focus on the venture capital industry. We build a two-stage model capturing moral hazard, effort provision, and hold-up problems between entrepreneurs and investors. Across multiple financing scenarios we solve numerically for optimal decision policies and NPV, finding significant value losses from first-best. A commitment to competitive syndicate financing increases effort and NPV and benefits all parties. However, syndicate financing raises potential information problems, and the fixed-fraction participation rule of Admati-Pfleiderer (1994) fails with endogenous effort. We find that debt financing is often less efficient than equity financing, for while it improves effort incentives it worsens hold-up and debt overhang problems in later-stage financing. In the next chapter I turn to the collateralized debt obligation or "CDO" market. CDOs are closed-end, actively-managed, highly leveraged bond funds whose managers typically receive subordinated compensation packages. I develop a model of manager trading behavior and quantify under-investment and asset substitution problems, calibrating to market parameters.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Garrison, Kedran

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stewart C. Myers.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33835
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33835

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33835