For the last two decades, non-US firms have lower valuations than similar US firms. We study the evolution of this valuation gap to assess whether financial markets are less integrated after the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). The valuation gap for firms from developed markets increases by...

A large loss is not evidence of a risk management failure because a large loss can happen even if risk management is flawless. I provide a typology of risk management failures and show how various types of risk management failures occur. Because of the limitations of past data in assessing the...

During the financial crisis, corporate borrowing and capital expenditures fall sharply. Most existing research links the two phenomena by arguing that a shock to bank lending (or more generally to the corporate credit supply) caused a reduction in capital expenditures. The economic significance...

Much attention has been paid to the large decreases in value of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the financial crisis. Many observers have argued that the fall in prices was partly driven by decreased liquidity and fire sales. We investigate whether capital...

Defining normal cash holdings as the holdings a firm with the same characteristics would have had in the late 1990s, we find that the average abnormal cash holdings of U.S. firms after the financial crisis amount to 10% of cash holdings, which represents an 87% increase in abnormal cash holdings...

Though much of the narrative of the financial crisis has focused on the impact of a bank credit supply shock, we show that such a shock cannot explain important features of the financial and investment policies of industrial firms. These features are consistent with a dominant role for the...

Though overall bank performance from July 2007 to December 2008 was the worst since at least the Great Depression, there is significant variation in the cross-section of stock returns of large banks across the world during that period. We use this variation to evaluate the importance of factors...

Firms with greater financial flexibility should be better able to fund a revenue shortfall resulting from the COVID-19 shock and benefit less from policy responses. We find that firms with high financial flexibility within an industry experience a stock price drop lower by 26% or 9.7 percentage...

The moral hazard incentives of the bank safety net predict that distressed banks take on more risk and higher leverage. Since many factors reduce these incentives, including charter value, regulation, and managerial incentives, the net economic effect of these incentives is an empirical...

Although firm financial policies were affected by a credit contraction during the recent financial crisis, the impact of increased uncertainty and decreased growth opportunities was stronger than that of the credit contraction per se. From the start of the financial crisis (third quarter of...