China is reforming its banking system, partially privatizing and permitting minority foreign ownership of three of the dominant 'big four' state-owned banks. This paper seeks to help predict the effects of this change by analysing the efficiency of virtually all Chinese banks in the years...

China is reforming its banking system, partially privatizing and permitting minority foreign ownership of three of the dominant ‘big four’ state-owned banks. This paper seeks to help predict the effects of this change by analysing the efficiency of virtually all Chinese banks in the years...

Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...

This paper examines the impact of promotion-based tournament incentives on corporate acquisition performance. Measuring tournament incentives as the compensation ratio between the CEO and other senior executives, we show that acquirers with greater tournament incentives experience lower...

We empirically examine the hypothesis that the gender of firm decision makers, i.e., small firm owners and large firm board directors, significantly affects within-firm wage disparity, defined as the ratio of decision makers’ to average employees’ compensation. Using unique data for both...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly a core component of corporate strategy in the global economy. In recent years its importance has become even greater, primarily because of the financial scandals, investors’ losses, and reputational damage to listed companies. While...

We examine the connection between the number of bank relationships and firms' performance using a unique data set on Italian small firms for which banks are a major source of financing. Our evidence indicates that return on equity and return on assets decrease as the number of bank relationships...