This article examines the role of commercial real estate investments in the banking crisis of 1985-92, an unprecedented period during which more than 1,300 banks failed. Bank failures are fundamentally important because of the unique role played by financial institutions in the provision of...

In this study, we use data on intra-day transactions to analyze whether REIT liquidity as measured by the bid-ask spread changed from 1990 to 1994, a period during which the industry's market capitalization increased from $9 billion to $45 billion. We find that REIT spreads narrowed...

We examine the usage of debt by small firms trading on the over-the-counter (OTC) market and filing annual reports with the SEC. Similar to firms included in the Survey of Small Business Finance, the small OTC firms in our sample are more dependent on debt financing than firms listed on the NYSE...

This study uses data from thrift institutions to provide new evidence on the relation between executive pay and firm performance. We find a positive and statistically significant relation between CEO pay and firm performance as measured by both return on assets and return on equity. Moreover,...

This study uses a two-factor market-model to estimate excess returns around 43 announcements of FSLIC-assisted thrift mergers and 66 announcements of unassisted thrift mergers. These estimated excess returns are then used to test hypotheses about asymmetric-information and principal-agent...

This article examines the determinants of both book-value insolvency and regulatory closure in the thrift industry. Agency theory suggests that the determinants of insolvency and closure are a function of conflicts between shareholders and creditors, shareholders and managers, and regulators and...

In this article, we discuss how fracking can affect housing prices in both positive and negative ways. We then critique several recent papers that use hedonic regression to analyze the effect of fracking on house prices and conclude that fracking has an unambiguously negative affect on housing...

Numerous collapses and corporate scandals of large corporations have underscored the impact of corporate conduct on capital markets and society as a whole. These failures have highlighted the need for regulators to rethink regulatory frameworks and enforcement, and for corporations to rework...

We compare the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of the time-varying hazard model developed by Shumway (2001) and the one-period probit model used by Cole and Gunther (1998). Using data on U.S. bank failures from 1985 – 1992, we find that, from an econometric perspective, the hazard model is...

How quickly do the CAMEL ratings regulators assign to banks during on-site examinations become "stale"? One measure of the information content of CAMEL ratings is their ability to discriminate between banks that will fail and those that will survive. To assess the accuracy of CAMEL ratings in...