We find that foreign institutional investors (FIIs) reduce their investee firms’ tax avoidance. We provide evidence that the effect is driven by the institutional distance between FIIs’ home countries/regions and host countries/regions. Specifically, we find that the effect is driven by the...

We contend that economic preferences over risk-taking in different subnational regions worldwide affect fundamental aspects of firms’ corporate financing, namely financing costs and capital structure. We study this hypothesis, by hand-matching firms’ regions worldwide with the corresponding...

This paper analyses the comovements in corporate event waves and assesses the effects of monetary policy on creating the comovement dynamics. First, we trace the time-series properties of these waves and highlight their common statistical properties. Second, developing a novel Bayesian factor...

Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...

Using recent cross-national data on more than 100 nations, this study investigates the financial effects of economy-wide institutional quality (corruption) on various bank activities: (i) the ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans; (ii) the capital-to-assets ratio; (iii) the...

Do prior lending relationships result in pass-through savings (lower interest rates) for borrowers, or do they lock in higher costs for borrowers? Theoretical models suggest that when borrowers experience greater information asymmetry, higher switching costs, and limited access to capital...

This paper provides cross-country evidence that variations in bank regulatory policies result in differences in income distribution. In particular, the overall liberalization of banking systems decreases the Gini coefficient and the Theil index significantly. However, this effect fades away for...

The positive relation between financial development and economic growth seems to have weakened in recent years and when analyzing only developed countries. We suggest here that banks' relative ability to intermediate funds cost-efficiently is a quality-based measure of financial development that...

The Central European banking industry is dominated by foreign-owned banks. During the recent crisis, for the first time since the transition, foreign parent companies were frequently in worse financial conditions than their subsidiaries. This situation created a unique opportunity to study new...

The Central European banking industry is dominated by foreign-owned banks. During the recent crisis, for the first time since the transition to a post-Communist era in this region, foreign parent companies were frequently in worse financial conditions than their subsidiaries. This situation...