We study the value of the political connections of directors on Chinese boards. We build a new dataset that measures connections of directors to members of the Politburo via past school ties, and find that private firms with politically connected directors in the boardroom get on average about...

We reassess one of the major puzzles in international macroeconomics, namely the equity home bias puzzle, to shed some light on how it is affected by financial leverage. As corporate debt is generally key to employment, the analysis can provide interesting insights to the mooted argument...

The outburst of the euro area sovereign debt crisis made evident the feedback loop between the sovereigns and the banks. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the feedback loop has receded after the implementation by the European authorities of a number of monetary and regulatory policy...

There is growing recent interest about the effect that local culture, social values and norms, derived from religion have on corporate risk taking. The growing literature on this topic has provided evidence of the effect of religious adherence in reducing risk taking. However, the effect of...

We show that Chinese firms engaging in corrupt practices pay significantly higher salaries to their management team as well as to their directors, although important differences arise between the private and the state sector. Our evidence suggests that managers in private companies use...

We examine the effect of elite connections on CEO pay and turnover decisions, using a large sample of Chinese listed firms. Our findings show that CEOs of private listed firms benefit from significantly higher salaries (a 25% increase), consistent with the resource dependence theory, whereas the...

The purpose of this paper is to test whether tensions in the sovereign of the 5 largest euro area Member States had an impact on the funding sources of the most relevant banks based in these Member States and more specically, on the issuance of covered bonds. This could constitute additional...