This paper proposes a theoretically based and easy-to-implement way to measure the systemic risk of financial institutions using publicly available accounting and stock market data. The measure models the credit enhancement taxpayers provide to individual banks in the Merton tradition (1974) as...

Risk-shifting occurs when creditors or guarantors are exposed to loss without receiving adequate compensation. This paper seeks to measure and compare how well authorities in 56 countries controlled bank risk shifting during the 1990s. Although significant risk shifting occurs on average,...

Default probability plays a central role in the static tradeoff theory of capital structure. We directly test this theory by regressing the probability of default on proxies for costs and benefits of debt. Contrary to predictions of the theory, firms with higher bankruptcy costs, i.e., smaller...

Mispriced and misadministered deposit insurance imparts risk-shifting incentives to U.S. banks. Regulators are expected to monitor and discipline increases in bank risk exposure that would transfer wealth from the FDIC to bank stockholders. This paper assesses the success regulators had in...

We develop a new identification strategy to evaluate the impact of the geographic expansion of bank holding company (BHC) assets across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on BHC risk. We find that the geographic expansion of bank assets reduces risk. Moreover, geographic expansion...

We quantify the role of financial leverage behind the sluggish post-crisis investment performance of European firms. We use a cross-country firm-bank matched database to identify separate roles for firm leverage, bank balance sheet weaknesses arising from sovereign risk, and aggregate demand...

This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two novel identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in...

We employ a novel dataset on almost 30,000 trade credit contracts to describe the broad characteristics of the parties that contract together and the key contractual terms of these contracts. Whereas prior work has typically used information on only one side of the buyer-seller transaction, this...

Is financial innovation necessary for sustaining economic growth? To address this question, we build a Schumpeterian model in which entrepreneurs earn profits by inventing better goods and profit-maximizing financiers arise to screen entrepreneurs. The model has two novel features. First,...

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. We extend our earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks' assets and liabilities, including during the recent...