Mark Jeffrey Flannery is an American economist, since 2024 the Bank of America Eminent Scholar professor emeritus at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.
[1][2] From 2014 to 2016, Flannery was Director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Economic and Risk Analysis.
His most cited article is "Partial Adjustment Toward Target Capital Structure" (with Kasturi Rangan), published in the 2006 Journal of Financial Economics.
[6] In 2005, before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, he published a book chapter discussing the advantages of this type of security.
This unwillingness to issue equity when there would be a wealth transfer away from existing shareholders is known as the "debt overhang" problem.