Solvency regulation of the U.S. insurance industry occurs at the state level and is led by insurance commissioners who wield significant discretion. I construct a novel dataset of the employment history of these commissioners and find 38% of them work in the insurance industry after their term...

Uncertainty in banking regulation may impose widespread economic costs by increasing fi nancialconstraints on credit availability. Four years of Dodd Frank uncertainty over undecided riskweightings increased regulatory uncertainty for smaller banks, restricting "vanilla" interest ratehedging...

Firms' inflexibility in adjusting output prices to input-cost shocks exacerbates information asymmetry between firm insiders and outsiders, but the government's disclosure of economic statistics mitigates this problem. We measure the public visibility of firms' input costs using a combination of...

In this study, we propose our hypothesis that the distinguishable principal-agent relationships of German banks are significantly influencing the risk-taking attitudes of bank managers. Particularly, we intend to substantiate the theory that banks owned by dispersed shareholders or federal state...

Disagreement about stock valuation, combined with short-sales constraints, can increase asset prices. We build a model showing that, so long as investor beliefs are not perfectly correlated, investors will disagree less about the value of a conglomerate than about each of its individual...

This paper investigates the information spillover effect of government bailouts. Analyzing money market funds' dynamic enrollment status in the U.S. Treasury Temporary Guarantee Program in 2008, this paper finds that enrolled funds had overall positive fund flows, implying that the stability...

Exploiting position-level heterogeneity in regulatory incentives to misreport and novel data on regulators, we document that U.S. life insurers inflate the values of corporate bonds using internal models. We estimate an additional $9-$18 billion decline in regulatory capital during the 2008...

This study develops and evaluates a model that generates synthetic credit ratings using accounting and market based information. The model performs very well in explaining agency ratings, suggesting that fitted values for unrated companies are likely to be reasonably precise. In addition, the...