We empirically investigate the role of country governance in the privatization of 113 government-owned banks from 1996 to 2007 across 39 countries. First, privatized banks tend to outperform non-privatized banks after the privatization, which is called the privatization effect. Second, we find...

Over a period that includes the 1998 Russian crisis and 2007-2009 financial crisis, banks with overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) were more likely to weaken lending standards and increase leverage than other banks in advance of a crisis, making them more vulnerable to the shock of the...

In this study, we reinvestigate the question of whether government banks are inferior to private banks. We use cross country data from 1993 to 2007 to trace the different types of government banks. These types comprise banks that acquire distressed banks, normal banks, or no banks at all....

We hypothesize that when managers do not exercise their options, they signal valuable private information. Accordingly, we construct a proxy to capture managers’ private information from their in-the-money vested options unexercised (VOU) and find a positive relation with subsequent operating...