We exploit the outset of a regulation seeking to improve judicial efficiency through the rearrangement of courts’ geography in Italy to provide causal evidence on the relationship between judiciary structural reforms and banks financial stability. To this end, we apply a...

This paper proposes a theoretical model that incorporates corporate governance into the basic CAPM, where corporate governance affects the disutility of managerial effort and the possibility of managers to divert company resources. It shows that corporate governance affects firms’ stock...

We assess the credit market impact of allowing mortgage "strip-down" as a foreclosure-prevention measure, where strip-down reduces the principal of underwater residential mortgages to the current market value of the property for homeowners in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Our identification is provided...

This paper utilizes data on the presence of prominent individuals-that is, those with political (e.g., Members of Parliament) and aristocratic titles (e.g., lords)--on the boards of directors of English and Welsh banks from 1879 - 1909 to investigate whether the appointment of well-connected...

Firm-level stock returns differ enormously in reaction to COVID-19 news. We characterize these reactions using the Risk Factors discussions in pre-pandemic 10-K filings and two text-analytic approaches: expert-curated dictionaries and supervised machine learning (ML). Bad COVID-19 news lowers...

We study how furlough affects household financial distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furlough increases the probability of late housing and bill payments by 30% and 9%, respectively. The effects exist for individuals who rent their home, but not mortgagees who can mitigate financial distress...

Uncertainty about the level of demand is thought to influence irreversible capacity decisions. This paper examines some implications of the theory literature on this topic in an empirical study of the US cement industry between 1994 and 2006. Firms in this sector have the ability to deliver...

The interplay between banks and the macroeconomy is of key importance for financial and economic stability. We analyze this link using a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) which extends a standard VAR for the U.S. macroeconomy. The model includes GDP growth, inflation, the...