This paper examines the quality of credit ratings assigned to banks in Europe and the United States by the three largest rating agencies over the past two decades. We interpret credit ratings as relative assessments of creditworthiness, and define a new ordinal metric of rating error based on...

We investigate regulatory arbitrage during the G20's global derivatives market reform. Using hand-collected data on staggered reform progress, we find that banks shift their trading towards less regulated jurisdictions. The result is driven by agenda items – such as the promotion of central...

We study how the introduction of a law protecting consumer data privacy affects the cost of credit in the US mortgage market. Our estimates reveal that the California Consumer Protection Act increases loan spreads charged by banks by 8 basis points but that it has no effect on the fixed...

In this paper we investigate what drives the decision of stock exchanges to demutualize and going public, using a sample of 109 stock exchanges. We find that stock exchanges that demutualize and go public are in countries that have a higher level of economic and political freedom, facing greater...

This paper demonstrates that low bank capital carries a negative externality because it amplifies local shock spillovers. We exploit a natural disaster that is transmitted to firms in non-disaster areas via their banks. Firms connected to a strongly disaster-exposed bank with lowest-quartile...

Complementarity between performance pay and other organizational design elements has been argued to be one potential explanation for stark differences in the observed productivity gains from performance pay adoption. Using detailed data on internal organization for a nationally representative...

We propose a mechanism explaining the recent high positive correlation between cryptocurrencies and the stock market. With a unique dataset of investor-level holdings from a bank offering trading accounts and cryptocurrency wallets, we show that retail investors’ net trading volumes of stocks...

We use a new data set to study the determinants of the performance of open-end actively managed equity mutual funds in 27 countries. We find that mutual funds underperform the market overall. The results show important differences in the determinants of fund performance in the U.S. and elsewhere...

This article analyzes the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of various hedge fund portfolio strategies. Similarly to Avramov et al. (2007), we find that, before accounting for the effect of liquidity risk, hedge fund portfolios that incorporate predictability in managerial skills...

We develop a principal-agent model based on a sequential game played by a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. The model shows that investors' perceptions of the fund market play the key role in the fund's fee-setting mechanism. The managers' true...