This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of business and financial specific regulations on banks in the EU-27 over the 2004–2010 period. We employ a dataset of a wide range of business regulation indices from the “Doing Business” project of the World Bank. Results for the...

This paper examines the effect of host economy creditor rights and information sharing on the profit performance of foreign banks vis-à-vis domestic banks for a global sample of commercial banks over the 2005-2009 period. To this end, we employ the recent foreign bank ownership dataset of...

Using a conviction-based measure, we find that local (state-level) public corruption exerts a negative effect on the lending activity of US banks. Our baseline estimations show that the difference in public corruption between, e.g., Alabama, where corruption is high, and Minnesota, where...

We explore how bank CEOs' cultural heritage shapes the nexus between lending relationships and the cost of bank loans in the US syndicated loans market. We show that banks led by CEOs that trace their origin in more individualistic and masculine societies are less inclined to share with their...

This paper examines the impact of economic freedom on the cost of bank loans using a sample of 30,644 bank-loan observations in 50 US states over the period 1991–2018. We find that greater economic freedom has been consistently linked to lower loan spreads. Digging deeper into the components...

We investigate how the cultural heritage of the CEOs of banks acting as lead lenders in the US syndicated loan market shapes the relationship between public corruption and the cost of bank loans. We find strong evidence that banks led by CEOs originating from higher uncertainty avoidance...

We examine the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the financial reporting quality of US firms over 1999-2015. Using accruals-based earnings management as a proxy for financial reporting quality and the index of Baker et al. (2016) as an EPU measure we show that they exhibit a...