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...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the transparency of banks and the fragility of the banking system.We show that information-based bank runs may be inefficient because the deposit contract designed to provide liquidity induces depositors to have excessive incentives to...

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...

This paper demonstrates that, even if depositors are fully rational and always choose the Pareto dominant equilibrium when there are multiple equilibria, a bank run may still occur when depositors' expectations of the bank's fundamentals do not change.More specifically, a bank run may occur when...

The objective of this study is to examine whether and to what extent Australian banks use loan loss provisions (LLPs) for capital management, earnings management and signalling.We examine if there were changes in the use of LLPs due to the implementation of banking regulations consistent with...

Using theories of internal capital markets, this paper examines the link between financial market integration and the value of global diversification.Based on a sample of 1,491 completed cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) conducted by US acquirers during the 1990-2003 period, we find...