We document that the deregulation of bank branching restrictions in the United States triggered a reallocation across sectors, with end effects on state-level volatility. This change in state-level volatility cannot be explained simply by shifts in sector-level returns and volatility. A...

We develop an equilibrium model of real and financial market integration in which real firms and financial investors independently decide on their investment into different locations (countries). We show that, in the presence financial frictions, firms' real investment choices become strategic...

We show that in recent years global factor models have been catching up significantly with their local counterparts in terms of explanatory power (R2) for international stock returns. This catch-up is driven by a rise in global factor betas, not a rise in factor volatilities, suggesting that the...

I examine U.S. firms' motives for participating in cross-border syndicated loans with foreign banks. Firms borrowing from foreign lead arrangers pay higher interest rates on their loans compared to firms borrowing from local banks, controlling for firm and loan characteristics and using matched...

This paper examines how efficiency dynamics of Islamic and conventional banks compare and how they are converging across different countries. We employ both parametric and non-parametric methods to analyse a panel of Islamic and conventional banks from 23 countries during the period 1999 to...

The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage...

We show that financial risk-taking originates in preindustrial ancestral population diversity. We use data on immigrants residing in the United States and show that controlling for all known determinants of portfolio decisions, diversity positively affects stock market participation and asset...

Loans granted by banks to several entrepreneurs jointly, but for their own individual business and/or projects, are rarely studied. Analyzing 32 million month-loan observations from the Bolivian credit register, we establish that group loans comprise a sizeable part of the formal credit market,...

Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

We present a hybrid model for diagnosis and critical time forecasting of real estate bubbles. The model combines two elements: 1) the Log Periodic Power Law (LPPL) model to describe endogenous price dynamics originated from positive feedback loops between economic agents; and 2) a diffusion...