According to recent law and finance research, legislation is essential to financial development. More effi-cient financial markets would be achieved by reforming the laws governing investor protection and cor-porate governance systems. The Companies Act has traditionally played a very important...

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...

This study proposes an information asymmetry hypothesis to examine why bank credit ratings vary among countries even when bank financial ratios remain constant. Countries are divided among those with low and high information asymmetry. The former include high-income countries, those in North...

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...

This paper investigates the potential effects of stock options on managers’ investment decisions and therefore on a firm’s growth or, alternatively, on its leverage-growth relationship. To structure the analysis addressing this issue, the paper utilizes a framework establishing a negative...

Although it is widely acknowledged that the benefits of corporate governance reform could be substantial, systematic evidence on such reforms is scant. We both document and evaluate a contemporary corporate governance reform by constructing 18 measures of shareholder and creditor protection for...

The solvency standards implicit in bank capital levels, as reported eg in Jackson et al (2002), are much higher than those required for top ratings, if standard single period economic capital models are taken se-riously. We explain this excess capital puzzle by forward looking rating targeting...

We offer a unified framework to analyze the determination of employment, employee effort, wages, profit sharing and capital structure when firms face stochastic revenue shocks. We apply a generalized Nash bargaining solution, which extends the wage bargaining literature by incorporating...

This paper examines what institutional and bank-specific factors determine bank stock price synchronicity. Using data on 37 countries from 1996–2007, we find that bank stocks are more aligned with the whole market (1) during the financial crisis; (2) in countries that have more credit provided...