China’s economic development has been exceptionally robust since the end of the 1970s, and the country has already emerged as the second biggest economy in the world. In this study, we seek to illuminate the role of the monetary policy in this successful economic performance and as a part of...

The policy changes and structural reforms in transition economies over the past two decades have created exogenous variations in institutional development, which offers us an ideal natural experiment to analyse the causal effects of institutions on bank risk-taking behaviour. This paper examines...

This study examines the cost and profit efficiency of banking sectors in six transition countries of South-Eastern Europe over the period 1998–2008. Using the stochastic frontier approach, our analysis reveals that the average cost efficiency of SEE banks is 68.59% and the average profit...

A sweeping and protracted reform of corporate law took place in Finland in the 1970s. The reform brought significant improvements to investor protection and, similar to the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, tightened disclosure rules at the cost of increasing the work load in corporate reporting. We find...

Finland experienced an extremely severe economic depression in the early 1990s. In the midst of this crisis, significant new legislation was passed that increased supervisory powers of financial market regulators and reformed bankruptcy procedures, significantly decreasing the protection of...

This study uses the current financial crisis as a quasi-experiment to examine whether and to what extent corporate boards affect the performance of firms. Using cumulative stock returns over the crisis to measure of firm performance, we find that board independence, as traditionally defined,...

We investigate how borrowers’ corporate governance influences bank loan contracting terms in emerging markets and how this relation varies across countries with different country-level governance. We find that borrowers with stronger corporate governance obtain favorable contracting terms with...

While the importance of currency movements to industry competitiveness is theoretically well established, there is little evidence that currency risk impacts US industries. Applying a conditional asset-pricing model to 36 US industries, we find that all industries have a significant currency...

We examine how political connections impact the process of going public. Specifically, we test how political connections impact the pricing of newly offered shares, the magnitude of underpricing, and the fixed cost of going public. Based on experiences of the new public firms in the Chinese...

While the signalling hypothesis has played a prominent role as the economic rationale associated with the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing puzzle (Welch, 1989), the empirical evidence on it has been mixed at best (Jegadeesh, Weinstein and Welch, 1993; Michaely and Shaw, 1994). This paper...