Discussions of financial risk often fail to distinguish between risks that are consciously borne and those that are not. To understand the breeding conditions for financial crises the prime focus of concern should not be simply on large risk-taking per se, but on the unintended, or unanticipated...

We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation activity. Exploiting thresholds in Europe's regulation and a major enforcement reform in Germany, we find that forcing a greater share of firms to publicly disclose their financial statements reduces firms' innovative...

The apogee of anti-smoking legislation in North America was reached early in the last century. In 1903, the Canadian Parliament passed a resolution prohibiting the manufacture, importation, and sale of cigarettes. Around the same time, fifteen states in the United States banned the sale of...

In the United States today, the system of financial regulation is complex and fragmented. Responsibility to regulate the financial services industry is split between about a dozen federal agencies, hundreds of state agencies, and numerous industry-sponsored self-governing associations....

This paper evaluates changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and gas-fired power plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation of electricity generation. I find that deregulated plants substantially reduce the price paid for coal (but...

While neoclassical models assume static cost-minimization by firms, agency models suggest that firms may not minimize costs in less-competitive or regulated environments. We test this using a transition from cost-of-service regulation to market-oriented environments for many U.S. electric...

High and increasing hospital prices have led to calls for price regulation. If prices are high because of consolidation, regulating prices could enhance welfare. However, high prices could also reflect increased willingness to pay by privately insured consumers for clinical and non-clinical...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

We present a description of two different accounting regimes that govern reporting practice in most developed countries. 'One-book' countries, e.g. Germany, use their tax books as the basis for financial reporting and 'two-book' countries, e.g. the United States, keep the books largely separate....

We propose a dynamic bank theory with a delayed loss recognition mechanism and a regulatory capital constraint at its core. The estimated model matches four facts about banks' Tobin's Q that summarize bank leverage dynamics. (1) Book and market equity values diverge, especially during crises;...