This study provides new evidence on the role of financial development in accounting for economic growth. To derive feasible policy implications, we estimate not only unbalanced panel regressions with period fixed effects, but also variance decompositions of annual GDP growth rates to examine...

This study extends the of-balance sheet (OBS) banking literature to thrift OBS activities by empirically examining the motivation for thrift institutions to engage in various OBS activities, and to shed light on the risk-based capital requirement of thrift OBS activities. This is the first known...

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of ownership structure and regulation on the risk-taking behavior of commercial banks and savings and loans. Our work differs from previous efforts in that we measure risk in terms of an institution's asset or business risk, using the Ronn-Verma...

This paper investigates the impact of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) of 1999 on the insurance industry. We identify three events that have a differential impact across the business lines of the insurance industry. The overall impact of the FSMA across the business lines in the...

We examine the link between the accuracy of consensus analysts' dividend forecasts, earnings predictability and dividend policies of firms in 39 countries from 1995 to 2004. For firms that display stronger dividend smoothing, as modeled by Lintner (1956), there is a lower correlation between...

This paper examines the initial and long-run performance of 130 Australian mining IPOs issued from 1979 to 1990. The results show an average underpricing of 107.18%, significantly higher than that previously documented for industrial firms. The time lapse between prospectus registration and...

In a relatively less litigious environment like Australia, it is common to find IPO firms that voluntarily provide forecasts in their prospectus. Using 158 Australian industrial IPOs listed from 1991 to 1997, we examine the impact of the disclosure and accuracy of earnings and dividend forecasts...

Recent media releases have placed enormous strains on the credibility of the underwriting industry. It has been alleged that underwriters in the US and UK collude and fix underwriting fees. In contrast to recent evidence on the underwriting spread in the US (Chen and Ritter, 2000), we find that...

This paper examines the initial and long-run performance of 130 Australian mining IPOs issued from 1979 to 1990. The results show an average underpricing of 107.18%, significantly higher than that previously documented for industrial firms. The time lapse between prospectus registration and...

In a relatively less litigious environment like Australia, it is common to find IPO firms that voluntarily provide forecasts in their prospectus. Using 158 Australian industrial IPOs listed from 1991 to 1997, we examine the impact of the disclosure and accuracy of earnings and dividend forecasts...