Do credit ratings help enforce market discipline on banks? Analyzing a uniquely comprehensive dataset consisting of 1,081 rating change announcements for 154 international financial institutions between January 2004 and December 2015, we find that rating downgrades for internal reasons, such as...

We investigate the influence of ongoing security class action lawsuits (SCAs) on takeover premiums, M&A announcement returns, and the likelihood of deal completion. Targets subject to an SCA receive between 7.6 and 10.2 percentage points lower takeover premiums, with this negative effect...

We analyze the shareholder wealth implications of the financial sector consolidation in the Asia-Pacific region between 1995 and 2013. The results suggest that market power consideration play a prominent role when capital market participants value M&As between Asian financial institutions. Asian...

CDS spreads contain information about expected credit risk, but how accurate is this information when uncertainty about credit risk arises? We document that CDS spreads of firms on negative credit watch (review for downgrade) change systematically into the direction implied by the ex-ante...

From 2005 to 2015, the 25 largest global financial institutions paid more than 285 billion US dollars in legal penalties, corresponding to approximately 20% of their market value. We examine the stock, bond, and CDS market reaction to the announcements of fines and settlements for banks. We...

We examine the stock market reaction of 381 firms with Russia exposure after the start of Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. We observe significant negative average abnormal returns of -2.65% (-4.06%) during the first 20 (30) trading-days after the start of the conflict indicating...

We test whether venture capital (VC) or private equity (PE) backing at the time of a firm's IPO leads to different post-IPO acquisition strategies. Using a sample of 1,341 US IPOs between 2001 and 2017 and 1,845 subsequent acquisitions by these newly public firms, we find that PE-backed newly...

This study assesses the redistributive impacts of fiscal instruments in a 2014 Mexican household budget survey (ENIGH) correcting for potential top-income measurement problems. We use two correction methods based on within-survey information to re-estimate the redistributive impacts of...

Economic inequality across Asia has been growing, but dimensions of this inequality and their development are unclear. This paper evaluates income inequality using household surveys from China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and Taiwan. These countries may be viewed as jointly representative of...

Substantial evidence exists that economic inequality in Asia has been growing, but the dimensions of this inequality and its growth are far less clear. This paper evaluates inequality in household incomes per capita across various demographic groups in income surveys from six middle- and...