Despite a well-documented profitability, health and safety (H&S) programs remain an uncommon investment among large U.S. companies. This article is the first to demonstrate a negative link between the financial leverage of firms and the implementation of H&S programs. This effect is robust to...

Return on Equity (RoE) is a central measure of performance in the banking industry, which is used to allocate capital inside and across divisions. The reliance on this metric emerged from the risk management approach to banking which underlies bank capital regulation. Using the financial crisis,...

Using a multidimensional index of board members’ diversity, we document a positive impact of board diversity on firm performance, for a panel of Vietnamese listed firms. Results are robust to the introduction of firm fixed effects, the use of an instrumental variable and changes in the board...

In this paper, we investigate how labor regulation interacts with financial leverage to explain the level of compensation firms pay to their employees. Firm leverage increases the risk of displacement of employees and the bargaining power of shareholders, implying opposite effects on the level...

This paper analyzes family-owned banks in Thailand. Using the data before the financial crisis, we find that wealthy families extensively use pyramids to control a business empire which includes financial and non-financial firms. We analyze the entire family group structure and find that...

This paper investigates a little studied but common mechanism that firms use to obtain state favors: business owners themselves seeking election to top office. Using Thailand as a research setting, we find that the more business owners rely on government concessions or the wealthier they are,...

This paper shows that pyramidal ownership can be used to control downside risk. The research setting is Thailand before and after the 1997 Asian crisis. The focus is on family business groups that owned banks. The results show that the controlling family pursues different investment strategies...

This paper investigates the mechanisms that firms use to get state favors. We focus on a less well studied but common mechanism: business owners seeking election to top office. Using Thailand as a research setting, we find that business owners who rely on government concessions or are wealthier...

This paper investigates how banks and finance companies operate in a family business group. Using uniquely detailed ownership data from Thailand, we find that the controlling families extensively use pyramids to control banks and finance companies and assign different lending strategies across...

This paper studies the effect of anti-bribery enforcement on the accrual quality of investigated firms and their peers. We analyze a hand-collected sample of 241 bribery cases investigated under the US Foreign Corruption Practices Act (FCPA) over the period 1978-2015. Exploiting the disclosure...