We study the impact of firms' abnormal business operations on their future crash risk in stock prices. Computed based on real earnings management (REM) models, firms' deviation in real operations from industry norms (DRO) is shown to be positively associated with their future crash risk. This...

​Prior studies of real-activity earnings management (REM) focus on earnings-inflating abnormal activities. We seek to establish the existence of downward REM by investigating several corporate events in which managers have incentives to temporarily deflate market valuations. Specifically, we...

This paper examines the effects of strategic alliances on non-financial firms bank loan financing. We construct several measures to capture firms alliance activities using the frequency of alliance activities, the prominence of the alliance partner and the relative networking position in the...

This study examines the cost and profit efficiency of banking sectors in six transition countries of South-Eastern Europe over the period 1998 2008. Using the stochastic frontier approach, our analysis reveals that the average cost efficiency of SEE banks is 68.59% and the average profit...

The policy changes and structural reforms in transition economies over the past two decades have created exogenous variations in institutional development, which offers us an ideal natural experiment to analyse the causal effects of institutions on bank risk-taking behaviour. This paper examines...

This paper examines through various channels the effects of CEO social network heterogeneity on firm value. We construct four measures of heterogeneity based on demographic attributes, intellectual backgrounds, professional experience, and geographical exposures of individuals in the CEO social...

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...

We examine changes in the corporate tax rate across the U.S. and their implications on the pricing and quantity of loans. We find an asymmetric effect on the cost of credit: loan spreads decrease by approximately 5.9 basis points in response to a one percentage tax cut, but they are insensitive...

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...