Although bank capital regulation permits a bank to choose freely between equity and subordinated debt to meet capital requirements, lenders and investors view debt and equity as imperfect substitutes. It follows that the mix of debt in regulatory capital should isolate the role that the market...

Nearly 25 percent of low-income households in the United States are unbanked. High fees are often cited as a reason they remain unbanked, leading some to believe that limiting bank fees would improve financial inclusion. We use the federal preemption of state limits on overdraft fees to study...

Investor concerns about climate and other environmental regulatory risks suggest that these risks should affect corporate bond risk assessment and pricing. We test this hypothesis and find that firms with poor environmental profiles or high carbon footprints tend to have lower credit ratings and...

In August of 2007, banks faced a freeze in funding liquidity from the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity in response to this freeze and its implications for corporate borrowing. Commercial banks in the United States raised deposits and...

This paper explores the advantages of a new financial charter for large, complex, internationally active financial institutions that would address the corporate governance challenges of such organizations, including incentive problems in risk decisions and the complicated corporate and...

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that granting employee stock options motivates CEOs of banking firms to undertake riskier projects. We also investigate whether granting employee stock options reduces the bank's incentive to borrow while inducing a buildup of regulatory capital. Using a...

We infer motives for trade initiation from market sidedness. We define trading as more two-sided (one-sided) if the correlation between the numbers of buyer- and seller-initiated trades increases (decreases), and assess changes in sidedness (relative to a control sample) around events that...

In response to the sharp decline in prices of financial stocks in the fall of 2008, regulators in a number of countries banned short selling of particular stocks and industries. Evidence suggests that these bans did little to stop the slide in stock prices, but significantly increased costs of...

Ongoing regulatory reform efforts aim to make the over-the-counter derivatives market more transparent by introducing public reporting of transaction-level information, including price and volume of trades. However, to date there has been a scarcity of data on the structure of trading in this...

The profit to a standard short-term return reversal strategy can be decomposed analytically into four components: 1) across-industry return momentum, 2) within-industry variation in expected returns, 3) under-reaction to within-industry cash flow news, and 4) a residual. Only the residual...