We exploit the information content of option prices to construct a novel measure of bank tail-risk. We document a persistent increase in tail-risk for the U.S. banking industry following the global financial crisis, except for banks designated as systemically important by the Dodd-Frank Act. We...

The U.S. government uses its voting power to direct IMF funds to countries where U.S. banks stand to lose the most from sovereign default -- a de facto bailout. Consistent with this, the likelihood a defaulting sovereign is granted an IMF loan is increasing in U.S. banks' exposure to that...

Do people "vote with their feet" due to a lack of political competition? We formalize the theory of political competition and migration to show that increasing political competition lowers political rent leading to net in-migration. Our empirical application using US data supports this...

We model and predict that politicians have incentives to delay bank failure in election years and that this incentive is exacerbated if the election is close. Our empirical application using the US data supports these predictions. At the bank level, we show that bank failure in an election year...

We exploit exogenous variation in the timing of gubernatorial elections to study the timing of bank failure in the US. Using a Cox proportional hazard model, we show that bank failure is about 45% less likely in the year leading up to an election. Political control can explain all of this...