This study looks inside a large retail-banking group to understand how corporate politics affect internal capital allocation. The group consists of a headquarters organization and about 150 member banks which own the headquarters. Our data is from the firm’s managerial accounting system and...

Co-operative banks are widely seen as sustainable alternatives to profit-driven banking. However, while most banks struggle to meet the stringent capital requirements of regulators, co-operative banks are in particular need of cautious capital-related decisions given their little ability to...

This study investigates the relative importance of factors shaping banking and corporate landscapes in Thailand after 1997 through an empirical analysis of micro-data of Thai banks and firms. The results of the analysis of the bank data show that the deceleration of bank credit growth is mainly...

This study investigates the changing relations between banks and their business customers in selected Asian emerging economies. These changes are manifest in declining bank lending growth and can be attributed to three major driving forces: cyclical factors, the fallout from the 1997 Asian...

While much attention has been focused on the optimal ratio of a firm's debt to equity, the quot;optimalquot; or best balance between bond financing and (longer-term) bank financing has scarcely been addressed. This essay examines the principal differences between an economy with a well-developed...

This paper provides an explanation for the urge of banks to merge and expand scope. We build a model where bank activities evolve over time. Due to deregulation and technological advances, new opportunities become available, but the skill needed to exploit them effectively may be unknown. Early...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of relationship banking in Japan, a country in which banks have assumed a more prominent role than that played by counterparts in other countries. First, we survey corporate finance trends for listed firms in the 1990s and present two puzzling...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

We investigate the effect of classified boards on the market reaction to seasoned equity offering (SEO) announcements and the operating performance following SEOs. We find that firms with classified boards on average earn lower SEO announcement returns and have worse abnormal operating...

We study the operating, financial, and ownership structure characteristics of newly listed firms which become acquisition targets shortly after their initial public offerings. We examine whether such firms get acquired because of their successful performance or as an alternative to delisting. We...