One of the most dramatic trends in banking since the 1980s has been the secular movement away from core banking and interest generating activities towards enhanced reliance on non-interest-generating activities that focus largely on fees and trading profits. In this paper, we draw on a dataset...

This paper investigates whether functional diversification is value-enhancing or value-destroying in the financial services sector, broadly defined. Based on a U.S. dataset comprising approximately 4,060 observations covering the period 1985-2004, we report a substantial and persistent...

This paper attempts to ascertain whether or not functional diversification is value-enhancing or value-destroying in the financial services sector. Based on a U.S. dataset comprising approximately 4060 observations covering the period 1985-2004, we report a substantial and persistent...

This paper investigates whether geographic diversification is value-enhancing or value-destroying in the financial services sector, broadly defined. Our dataset comprises approximately 3,579 observations over the period from 1985 to 2004 and covers the entire range of U.S. financial...

We investigate whether the diversification discount is simply a proxy for poor corporate governance. We find that the negative value impact of diversification is amplified by adverse governance variables such as low CEO ownership, low board independence, and board classification, and that...

We investigate whether the diversification discount occurs partly as an artifact of poor corporate governance. In panel data models, we find that the discount narrows by 16% to 21% when we add governance variables as regression controls. We also estimate Heckman selection models that account for...

We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 218 companies accused of price fixing. These firms engage in evasive financial reporting strategies, including earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements. In corporate governance, cartel firms favor outside directors...

In this paper, we test alternative feature selection methods for bankruptcy prediction and illustrate their superiority versus popular models used in the literature. We test these methods using a comprehensive dataset of more than one million financial statements from privately held Norwegian...