Boris Nikolov, Professor of Finance, University of Lausanne: The Sources of Financing Constraints

Time: 2019-03-20 08:00 Print

Topic: The Sources of Financing Constraints

Speaker: Boris Nikolov, Professor of Finance, University of Lausanne

Date: March 20 (Wednesday)

Time: 10:00-11:30am

Location: Building 4 Room 102

Language: English

Abstract:

In order to identify the relevant sources of firms' financing constraints, we ask what financial frictions matter for corporate policies. To that end, we build, solve, and estimate a range of dynamic models of corporate investment and financing, embedding a host of financial frictions. We focus on limited enforcement, moral hazard, and tradeoff models. All models share a common technology, but differ in the friction generating financing constraints. Using panel data on Compustat firms for the period 1980-2015 and a more recent dataset on private firms from Orbis, we determine which features of the observed data allow to distinguish among the models, and we assess which model performs best at rationalizing observed corporate investment and financing policies across various samples. Our tests, based on empirical policy function benchmarks, favor trade-of models for larger Compustat firms, limited commitment models for smaller firms, and moral hazard models for private firms. Our estimates point to significant financing constraints due to agency frictions.

About the speaker:

Boris Nikolov is a Full Professor of Finance at the University of Lausanne, the Director of the PhD Program in Finance, and a Swiss Finance Institute Professor. He was previously a faculty member at the University of Rochester. He holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Lausanne.

Professor Nikolov’s primary areas of research are corporate finance and corporate governance. In particular, he works in the area of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) finance where he develops novel corporate governance indices. Recently, he has focused on how Artificial Intelligence can help address corporate finance questions. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies.