Essays in corporate finance.

Summary This thesis is based on corporate finance, characterized by the use of game theory and information economics tools to analyze the financial choices of firms. Chapter 1 analyzes the auction of objects of uncertain value: a buyer will have higher welfare by participating in the sale of an object of uncertain value than in the sale of an object of uncertain value. Chapter 2 explores the possibility that financial contracts may pursue anti-competitive objectives: by purchasing sufficiently risky financial rights, an investor may commit to an entrepreneur not to finance another similar project. Thus, when financial markets are imperfectly competitive, bank equity investments may promote industrial concentration. Chapter 3 studies a general equilibrium model including moral hazard and bank anti-selection: a regulator can combat these problems by imposing a capital requirement and auditing banks ex ante and ex post. A regulator with a strong reputation will only use the amount of capital to solve the moral hazard problem, but a regulator with a weak reputation will also use it to solve the anti-selection problem. In the latter case, the economy has two equilibria and a crisis of confidence may occur. The right response to a crisis may be tighter regulation. Chapter 4 studies how splitting the rights of a firm' s income into a safe (debt) and a risky part can generate more information about the firm' s future income and thus better motivate managers.