Optimal Security Design under Asymmetric Information and Profit Manipulation

Konstantinos Koufopoulos; Roman Kozhan; Giulio Trigilia

doi:10.1093/rcfs/cfy008

Optimal Security Design under Asymmetric Information and Profit Manipulation

Konstantinos Koufopoulos, Roman Kozhan, Giulio Trigilia

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

We consider a model of external financing in which entrepreneurs are privately
informed about the quality of their projects and seek funds from competitive financiers. The literature restricts attention to monotonic, or “manipulation proof,” securities and finds that straight debt is the uniquely optimal contract. Monotonicity is commonly justified by the argument that it would endogenously arise if the entrepreneur can window dress the realized earnings before contract maturity. We explicitly characterize the optimal contracts when entrepreneurs engage in window dressing and/or output diversion and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for straight debt to be optimal. Contrary to conventional wisdom, debt is often suboptimal, and it is never uniquely optimal. Optimal contracts are nonmonotonic and induce profit manipulation in equilibrium. They can be implemented as performance-sensitive debt.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	146–173
Number of pages	28
Journal	Review of Corporate Finance Studies
Volume	8
Issue number	1
Early online date	28 Nov 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1093/rcfs/cfy008
Publication status	Published - 1 Mar 2019

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.

Keywords

security design
capital structure
asymmetric information
profit manipulation
window dressing

Access to Document

10.1093/rcfs/cfy008

Optimal Security Design under Asymmetric Information and Profit Manipulation (Accepted Version)
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.
Accepted author manuscript, 446 KBLicence: Unspecified

Cite this

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