We find that firms headquartered in U.S. counties with higher levels of social capital incur lower bank loan spreads. This finding is robust to using organ donation as an alternative social-capital measure and incremental to the effects of religiosity, corporate social responsibility, and tax...

This paper investigates the role of technical reserves in the income smoothing behavior of insurance companies. This is one of the first attempts in the literature to trace such relationship in the insurance industry, especially at a multi-country setting. The experience of 770 insurance firms...

We empirically examine three channels in the relation between banks' CDS trading and loan sales. The substitute channel predicts a negative relation between CDS hedging and loan sales, and the complementary channel predicts a positive relation. The credit-enhancement channel predicts a positive...

Non-compete agreements (also known as Covenants Not to Compete or CNCs) are frequently used by many businesses in an attempt to maintain their competitive advantage by safeguarding their human capital and the associated business secrets. Although the choice of whether to include CNCs in...

We examine the effect of the full set of bank capital regulations (capital stringency) on loan growth, using bank-level data for a maximum of 125 countries over the period 1998-2011. Contrary to standard theoretical considerations, we find that overall capital stringency only has a weak negative...

We empirically test the hypothesis that a major in economics, management, business administration or accounting (for simplicity referred to as business/economics) leads to more-conservative (right-wing) political views. We use a panel dataset of individuals (repeated observations for the same...

We investigate whether the levels of social capital in US counties, as captured by strength of civic norms and density of social networks in the counties, are systematically related to tax avoidance activities of corporations with headquarters located in the counties. We find strong negative...

We investigate whether the levels of social capital in US counties, as captured by strength of civic norms and density of social networks in the counties, are systematically related to tax avoidance activities of corporations with headquarters located in the counties. We find strong negative...

​Trust in banks is considered essential for an effective financial system, yet little is known about what determines trust in banks. Only a handful of single-country studies discuss the topic, so this paper aims to fill the gap by providing a cross-country analysis on the level and...

This study treats firm productivity as an accumulation of productive intangibles and posits that stakeholder engagement associated with better corporate social performance helps develop such intangibles. We hypothesize that because shareholders factor improved productive efficiency into stock...