This study treats firm productivity as an accumulation of productive intangibles and posits that stakeholder engagement associated with better corporate social performance helps develop such intangibles. We hypothesize that because shareholders factor improved productive efficiency into stock...

China is reforming its banking system, partially privatizing and permitting minority foreign ownership of three of the dominant 'big four' state-owned banks. This paper seeks to help predict the effects of this change by analysing the efficiency of virtually all Chinese banks in the years...

Using data from US labour market areas, we quantify empirical associations between entry by small firms and a vector of economic performance measures encompassing levels, volatilities and growth rates of several income and employment variables. Distinct and robust associations are found for net...

This paper examines the effects of strategic alliances on non-financial firms bank loan financing. We construct several measures to capture firms alliance activities using the frequency of alliance activities, the prominence of the alliance partner and the relative networking position in the...

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...

We document a remarkable increase in economic belief polarization - disagreement - regarding the future state of the economy across Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. We find evidence suggesting that belief polarization may have impeded the implementation of pandemic response measures such as...

This paper shows that local banking market conditions affect mortality rates in the United States. Exploiting the staggered relaxation of branching restrictions in the 1990s across states, we find that banking deregulation decreases local mortality rates. This effect is driven by a decrease in...

This paper proposes an early-warning bank risk measure based on the syndicate concentration of recent syndicated loans that a bank participates in. At the bank level, higher values of the measure predict greater risks (i.e., loan loss provisions, idiosyncratic return volatility, default...

Using lenders becoming members of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) as a plausible exogeneous shock, we examine whether and how lenders' commitment to transparent climate-related disclosures affects borrower firms' environmental performance. We find that client firms...

We study the implications of forging stronger political ties with the US on the sensitivities of stock returns around the world to a global common factor - the global financial cycle. Using voting patterns at the United Nations as a measure of political ties with the US along with various...