In this study, we test whether bankers make more loans when they enjoy superior creditor protection. We test these hypotheses using bank-level data from 35 developed countries and 113 developing countries over the period 2000-2006 and using a random-effects model that controls for bank...

Previous research has established (i) that a country’s financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking...

In this study, we analyze the firm’s choice of legal form of organization (“LFO”). We find that only about one in three firms begins operations as a proprietorship, while almost as many begin as limited-liability companies and as corporations. Moreover, this distribution is remarkably...

In this study, we use firm-level data from the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances to test the hypothesis that banking consolidation has reduced the availability of credit to small businesses. We find that banks in markets where mergers have occurred are more likely than other banks...

This study examines the determinants of CEO compensation using data from a nationally representative sample of privately held U.S. corporations. We find that: (i) the pay-size elasticity is much larger for privately held firms than for the publicly traded firms on which previous research has...

Previous research has established (i) that a country’s financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking...

In this study, we examine unsuccessful takeover attempts for new evidence on whether mergers create or destroy value for acquirers and targets. We contribute to the literature in three important areas. First, we contribute to the literature on signaling by investigating whether a takeover...

This article analyzes factors influencing the decisions of prospective lenders to extend credit to small and minority-owned businesses. Using data from a government survey of small businesses, the analysis reveals that prospective lenders (primarily commercial banks)are four times more likely to...

We examine changes in market values and accounting returns for a sample of publicly traded Chinese firms around announcements of block-share transfers among government agencies (“State Bureaucrats”), market-oriented State-owned enterprises (“MOSOEs”) and private investors (“Private...

The capital-structure decision is one of the most fundamental issues in corporate finance. Numerous studies have been conducted to test the two major competing theories of capital structure (Trade-Off Theory and Pecking-Order Theory), yet none of these studies has analyzed the capital-structure...