We find that the cultural distance between the CEO and a firm’s directors increases the sensitivity of CEO turnover and compensation to performance while enhancing shareholder value. This effect is concentrated in the cultural distance between the CEO and independent directors. More culturally...

The federal mortgage policy, the conforming loan limit (CLL), was spatially uniform before the recent financial crisis, despite heterogeneity across geography. An increased CLL leads to remarkable regional variation in declines in jumbo loan applications, exogenously increasing jumbo-lending...