Increased interdependencies across countries have led to calls for greater harmonization of regulations to prevent local shock from spilling over to other countries. Using the rulemaking process of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), this paper studies the process through which...

We examine the effects of CEO turnover in banks. Incoming bank CEOs face problems from information asymmetry because banks' operations are opaque and bank risk can change dramatically in a short time. Incoming bank CEOs may therefore change bank policies to manage their personal risks. Since CEO...

The world is currently in the throes of a sovereign debt crisis, which in its enormity far surpasses the Latin American crisis, which occurred two decades ago. The developed economies in an attempt to stimulate the economy during the recent recession adopted extraordinary measures both from the...

This paper documents the link between political voice and economic decision-making. Combining the repeal of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act as a shock to the enfranchisement of black Americans with granular data on the US mortgage market, we document a 14% decline in mortgage origination for...

We investigate the relative ability of two measures of the market implied cost of capital to predict aggregate equity market returns. One is Aggregate ICC, which is a weighted average of individual firms' ICC's. The other is ICC calculated using index information (Index ICC). Index ICC predicts...

We examine the effect of CEO turnover on earnings management in banks. Since banking is intrinsically an opaque activity, we hypothesize that an incoming CEO of a bank is more likely to manage earnings than a counterpart in a non financial firm. To identify the hypothesized effects, we exploit...

Should political institutions concentrate power in more hands or a single hand? This paper provides microeconomic evidence on the relationship between multiple elected representatives and economic growth. We find that increasing the number of politicians governing an area leads to greater firm...