​We aim to assess how accurately accounting and stock market indicators predict rating changes for Asian banks. We conduct a stepwise process to determine the optimal set of early indicators by tracing upgrades and downgrades from rating agencies, as well as other relevant factors. Our results...

Recently, banking literature has had a quest for appropriate pricing of bank loans under the new Basel II rules and has been in pursuit of possible outcomes for undertaking such credit risk. In this paper, we propose a simplified formula to price bank's corporate loans, aiming at making bank...

Using a novel proxy of investors' speculative demand constructed from online search interest in "concept stocks", we examine how speculative demand affects the returns and trading volume of Chinese stock indices. We find that returns and trading volume increase with the contemporaneous...

In this paper, by employing a novel approach, we study the relationship between bank type and small-business lending in a post-transition country. Using a unique dataset on bank branches and firm-level data, we find that local cooperative banks lend more to small businesses than do large...

Using a sample of 161 global banks in 23 countries, we examine the applicability of structural models and bank fundamentals to price global bank credit risk. First, we find that variables predicted by structural models (leverage, volatility, and risk-free rate) are significantly associated with...

We study the impact of firms' abnormal business operations on their future crash risk in stock prices. Computed based on real earnings management (REM) models, firms' deviation in real operations from industry norms (DRO) is shown to be positively associated with their future crash risk. This...

We find that firms headquartered in U.S. counties with higher levels of social capital incur lower bank loan spreads. This finding is robust to using organ donation as an alternative social-capital measure and incremental to the effects of religiosity, corporate social responsibility, and tax...

This paper investigates the role of technical reserves in the income smoothing behavior of insurance companies. This is one of the first attempts in the literature to trace such relationship in the insurance industry, especially at a multi-country setting. The experience of 770 insurance firms...

​Prior studies of real-activity earnings management (REM) focus on earnings-inflating abnormal activities. We seek to establish the existence of downward REM by investigating several corporate events in which managers have incentives to temporarily deflate market valuations. Specifically, we...

Non-compete agreements (also known as Covenants Not to Compete or CNCs) are frequently used by many businesses in an attempt to maintain their competitive advantage by safeguarding their human capital and the associated business secrets. Although the choice of whether to include CNCs in...