Consistent with mispricing explanations proposed in the literature to explain the value premium, the value premium is driven by stocks held by individual investors. Stocks held by institutional investors do not exhibit any significant value premium nor value effect while representing 93% of the...

Using a unique and comprehensive dataset, this paper develops and uses three distinct methods to quantify the risk of a systemic failure in the global banking system. We examine a sample of 334 banks (representing 80% of global bank equity) in 28 countries around 6 global financial crises (such...

Using data on over 6000 loans issued to US firms between 1990 and 2004, we find that lower takeover defenses (as proxied by lower G-index of Gompers, Ishii and Metrick (2003)) significantly increase the cost of bank loans for a firm. Firms with lowest takeover defense (democracy) pay 25% higher...

Recent corporate scandals have raised considerable concern among regulators and stock market participants about related party transactions (RPTs), prompting Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) to prohibit personal loans to executives and non-executive board members. In a representative sample of companies for...

We propose an exogenous measure of a country's growth opportunities by interacting the country's local industry mix with global price to earnings (PE) ratios. We find that these exogenous growth opportunities predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This...

We explain the size and the existence of the mutual fund industry by generalizing the standard competitive noisy rational expectations framework with endogenous information acquisition. Since informed agents optimally choose to open mutual funds in order to sell their private information, mutual...

Many corporations reward their outside directors with a modest fee for each board meeting they attend. Using a large panel data set on director attendance behavior in publicly-listed firms for the period 1996-2003, we provide robust evidence that directors are less likely to have attendance...

We estimate the effects of deregulation of U.S. banking restrictions on the amount of interstate personal income insurance during the period 1970-2001. Interstate income insurance occurs when personal income reacts less than one-to-one to state-specific shocks to output. We find that income...

We develop a model to analyze the effects of credit protection (e.g., credit insurance, guarantees, credit default swaps) on the provision of incentives to borrowers. Credit protection insulates lenders against losses when liquidating non--performing borrowers' projects. This hardens borrowers'...

This paper investigates whether Euro-zone equity returns are driven by country or industry effects over the 1990 to 2008 period. Using a style analysis approach, we find that before the introduction of the Euro country effects dominate, while industry effects prevail after 1999. This reversal at...