Restrictions on the ownership structure of a public company may harm the company's performance by preventing owners from choosing the best structure. We examine the stock-price performance and ownership structure, before and after the expiration of anti-takeover regulations, of a sample of...

In this study, we use data on intra-day transactions to analyze whether REIT liquidity as measured by the bid-ask spread changed from 1990 to 1994, a period during which the industry s market capitalization increased from $9 billion to $45 billion. We find that REIT spreads narrowed...

This study analyzes the performance of Texas commercial banks specializing in mortgage lending during the late 1980s and early 1990s to investigate how representative was their experience as compared with that of banks across the country concentrating in real estate lending. The results show...

We compare the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of the time-varying hazard model developed by Shumway (2001) and the one-period probit model used by Cole and Gunther (1998). Using data on U.S. bank failures from 1985 – 1992, we find that, from an econometric perspective, the hazard model is...

In this study, we analyze why U.S. commercial banks failed during the recent financial crisis. We find that proxies for commercial real estate investments, as well as traditional proxies for the CAMELS components, do an excellent job in explaining the failures of banks that were closed during...

In this study, we use data from the Federal Reserve’s 1993, 1998 and 2003 Surveys of Small Business Finances to classify small businesses into four groups based upon their credit needs and to model the credit allocation process into a sequence of three steps. First, do firms need credit? We...

This article examines the role of commercial real estate investments in the banking crisis of 1985-92, an unprecedented period during which more than 1,300 banks failed. Bank failures are fundamentally important because of the unique role played by financial institutions in the provision of...

How quickly do the CAMEL ratings regulators assign to banks during on-site examinations become "stale"? One measure of the information content of CAMEL ratings is their ability to discriminate between banks that will fail and those that will survive. To assess the accuracy of CAMEL ratings in...

In this study, we present panel-data evidence on REIT liquidity and its determinants over the 1988 – 2007 period. We focus upon liquidity measures that do not require micro-structure data (1) to facilitate use of our results as benchmarks for comparisons with results from international markets...

In this study, we analyze why commercial banks failed during the recent financial crisis. We find that traditional proxies for the CAMELS components, as well as measures of commercial real estate investments, do an excellent job in explaining the failures of banks that were closed during 2009,...