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...

Small and micro enterprises are usually majority owned by entrepreneurs. Using a unique sample of loan applications from such firms, we study the role of owners' gender in the credit decision of banks and the post-credit decision firm outcomes. We find that, ceteris paribus, female entrepreneurs...

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...

We provide the first global estimates of profit shifting at the subsidiary-year level. Employing nonparametric estimation techniques within a mainstay model of profit shifting, we examine the subsidiary-year responses of earnings to the composite tax indicator faced by all subsidiaries of a...

We study whether management practices determine merger and acquisition (M&A) success. We model management as an unobserved (latent) variable in a standard microeconomic model of the firm and derive firm-year management estimates. We validate these estimates against benchmark survey data on...

Corporate taxation can have re-distributive effects on income and wealth. We hypothesize and empirically establish such an effect working via bank credit. Using a unique sample of majority-owned firms that apply for credit, we show that after a decrease in corporate tax rates the relatively poor...

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers...

This paper provides evidence on how the new international regulation on Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) impacts the market value of large banks. We analyze the stock price reactions for the 300 largest banks from 52 countries across 12 relevant regulatory announcement and...

Economic theories provide conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepreneurial dynamism. To empirically investigate its impact, we construct local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents, home equity, and 1880 farmland. We identify its effects on...

The impact of U.S. bank loan announcements on the stock prices of the corporate borrowers has been decreasing during the two last decades with estimated two-day cumulative abnormal returns slipping from almost 200 basis points in the beginning of the 1980s to close to zero by the turn of the...