An underlying assumption in the executive compensation literature is that there is a national labor market for CEOs. The urban economics literature, however, documents higher ability among workers in large metropolitans, which results in a real and stable urban wage premium. In this paper, we...

We augment the LLSV creditor rights index with a new "restructuring index" that measures the incentives provided to creditors to grant concessions outside formal bankruptcy. We study the joint impact of the two indexes on a firm's leverage policy. We show that the two indexes have at most a...

On 15 December 2015, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) passed Rule 3211, requiring audit firms registered with PCAOB in the U.S. to disclose the audit engagement partner's name in the Form AP, effective 31 January 2017. The regulation aims to improve the transparency and...

Underlying idiosyncratic and illiquidity risks are suppressed in infrequently reported indexes of house prices and rents. Idiosyncratic risks result from bid-ask spreads for prices and rents. Time series autocovariances generate a distribution of prices and rents. Capital gains and rent-price...

We study CEO compensation in the banking industry by considering banks’ unique claim structure in the presence of two types of agency problems: the standard managerial agency problem and the risk-shifting problem between shareholders and debtholders. We empirically test two hypotheses derived...

We present a necessary and sufficient condition on an agent's utility function for a simple mean preserving spread in an independent background risk to increase the agent's risk aversion (incremental risk vulnerability). Gollier and Pratt (1996) have shown that declining and convex risk aversion...

Can monetary stimulus boost corporate investment? We answer this question by studying ECB's 2011-2012 Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs), which provided cheap funding to Eurozone banks. We find that, relative to their non-Eurozone counterparts, Eurozone firms invested more after the...

We study whether the presence of low-latency traders (including high-frequency traders (HFTs)) in the pre-opening period contributes to market quality, defined by price discovery and liquidity provision, in the opening auction. We use a unique dataset from the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) based on...

We show that bond purchases undertaken in the context of quantitative easing efforts by the European Central Bank created a large mispricing between the market for German and Italian government bonds and their respective futures contracts. On top of the direct effect the buying pressure exerted...

We study the impact of transparency on liquidity in OTC markets. We do so by providing an analysis of liquidity in a corporate bond market without trade transparency (Germany), and comparing our findings to a market with full post-trade disclosure (the U.S.). We employ a unique regulatory...