This study proposes an information asymmetry hypothesis to examine why bank credit ratings vary among countries even when bank financial ratios remain constant. Countries are divided among those with low and high information asymmetry. The former include high-income countries, those in North...

Banking supervision requires regular inspection and assessment of financial institutions. In Germany this task is carried out by the central bank ('Deutsche Bundesbank, BBK') in cooperation with the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority ('Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht,...

Firms are increasingly resorting to private placements in recent years, yet there is no published study of emerging markets. There is a unique opportunity to study this behavior during a severe financial crisis, when firms resorted to private placements to recover financially distressed firms....

This paper examines the impact of cultural distance on the underpricing of initial public offerings issued by foreign firms in the United States (foreign IPOs). Using a sample of 503 foreign IPOs from 27 countries for the 1980–2012 period, we find that greater cultural differences between U.S....

Bank loans have an increasing role for corporate activities. In most countries, bank loans are the main source of financing for small and medium-sized enterprises. Even though the role of banks decreased in the last years, banks take advantage of a privileged position which allows them to...

BankCaR is a credit risk model that forecasts the distribution of a commercial bank's charge-offs. The distribution depends only on systematic factors; BankCaR takes each bank and projects its expected charge-off across a distribution of good years and bad years. Since most bank failures occur...

Restrictions on the ownership structure of a public company may harm the company's performance by preventing owners from choosing the best structure. We examine the stock-price performance and ownership structure, before and after the expiration of anti-takeover regulations, of a sample of...

We evaluate the manner in which sponsors of highly leveraged asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) conduits responded to FASB Interpretation No. 46 (FIN 46), Consolidation of Variable Interest Entities an Interpretation of ARB No. 51, and its Canadian counterpart Accounting Standards Board of...

Although bank capital regulation permits a bank to choose freely between equity and subordinated debt to meet capital requirements, lenders and investors view debt and equity as imperfect substitutes. It follows that the mix of debt in regulatory capital should isolate the role that the market...

The deregulation of the banking industry during the 1990s provides a natural (public policy) experiment for investigating how firms adjust their executive compensation contracts as the environment in which they operate becomes relatively more competitive. Using the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 as a...