We extend our prior work on how both supply (including the emergence of OTC equity derivatives and growth in share lending) and demand (including the growth of hedge funds) factors now facilitate the large-scale, low-cost decoupling of shareholder voting rights from shareholder economic...

The paper studies the market reaction to the withdrawal of a prominent private bank - Kuhn Loeb - from the board of several firms. The event study shows that although Kuhn Loeb added significant value to the firms where it had a board seat, most of this value came from reduced industry...

Given the changes that occurred in the organization and specialization of Italian industrial districts and the changing geography of the banking system, in this paper is we aim at reassessing the bank-firm relationship in industrial districts. Using firm-level data on a sample of Italian SME, we...

The surrender option embedded in many life insurance products is a clause that allows policyholders to terminate the contract early. Pricing techniques based on the American Contingent Claim (ACC) theory are often used, though the actual policyholders' behavior is far from optimal. Inspired by...

This article empirically tests the hypothesis that credit-screening standards can be first increasing and then decreasing in the quality of the bank's pool of potential borrowers, which in turn may vary through the business cycle or across different segments of the lending markets. A key...

Asset securitization is a burgeoning trend in Russia as companies burdened by poor credit ratings seek access to capital at lower costs than they would be allowed in traditional equity or debt markets. In other countries, non-performing loan portfolios are assets that are frequently securitized....

Banks fail because of bad economic fundamentals, or panic withdrawals by depositors. We show that even though there is no need for regulation when the bank's policy regarding its solvency is transparent, there is indeed need for regulation if there is a lack of transparency. When the bank has...

Written immediately after the financial scandal involving the entire Governance of Banca Popolare Italiana (BPI) in 2006, this paper tries to answer the most frequently asked question by small, individual investors: are financial options a fair bet for anyone? Restated in a more general form,...

Special reimbursements for creditors in the case of the premature redemption of mortgaged loans are called prepayment penalties. They have been a controversially discussed topic in Germany for the last decade. This is mainly due to the fact that the European Union judges German prepayment...

We examine the distribution (across institutions and intertemporally) in charge-off and delinquency rates for six categories of loans held by U.S. banks and thrifts. The sample uses regulatory reporting data for roughly 230,000 institution-years from 1984 to 1999 (comprising over 2 million data...