Yes, it did. We use exogenous variation in banks' incentives to conform to the standards of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) around regulatory exam dates to trace out the effect of the CRA on lending activity. Our empirical strategy compares lending behavior of banks undergoing CRA exams...

Using transaction-level credit card spending from a leading Chinese commercial bank, we show that consumers prefer firms with higher Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) profiles. Specifically, we show that consumers increase their consumption by 4.9 percentage points as the ESG rating...

This paper examines the impact of the recently passed JOBS Act on the behavior of market participants. Using the JOBS Act - which relaxed mandatory information disclosure requirements - as a natural experiment on firms' choices of the optimal mix of hard, accounting information and textual...

Foreign investors generally underperform domestic investors in trading activities. This study shows that their inferior performance is attributed to non-initiated orders. Foreign investors actually perform better than domestic investors in initiated orders. In addition, their performance is also...

Using a sample of Hong Kong-listed stocks that are also traded on the London Stock Exchange, we document the following results: first, London market makers use Hong Kong's closing prices as the benchmark for setting the opening prices in London. Second, trading in the London market plays only a...

We examine herding behavior of domestic and foreign investors in the Indonesian stock market. We document that both domestic and foreign investors from a particular brokerage firm tend to herd. The foreign investors exhibit a greater propensity to herd than domestic investors. However, when we...

This paper empirically tests information asymmetries and learning in global commercial real estate markets. We find that foreign investors pay a premium of 3.6%, on average, relative to local investors for comparable properties in local markets. The premiums reflect information disadvantages of...

Using a unique sample of comparable online and in-person loan transactions, we study the determinants of arm's-length and inside lending focusing on the differential information content across debt types. We find that soft private information primarily underlies relationship lending whereas hard...

We examine the effect of direct mail (commonly referred to as junk mail) advertising on individual financial decisions by studying consumer choice of home equity debt contracts. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, we find that financial variables underlying the relative pricing of debt...