Did regulatory reforms that lowered barriers to competition among U.S. banks increase or decrease the quality of information that banks disclose to the public and regulators? We find that an intensification of competition reduced abnormal accruals of loan loss provisions and the frequency with...

Do stock markets act as a “spare tire” during banking crises, providing an alternative corporate financing channel and mitigating the economic severity of banking crises? Using firm-level data in 36 countries from 1990 through 2011, we find that the adverse consequences of banking crises on...

Building on the important study by Beck et al. (2005), we examine how government intervention in firms' decision-making is related to their investment and sales growth. Using the unique World Bank dataset (WBES) covering 6500 firms in 70 countries, we find strong evidence that the extent of...

Recent studies in the law and finance literature have shown that property rights protection is central to corporate financing and investment decisions and economic growth at large. We extend this literature by examining the effect of property rights security on corporate risk management...

We examine how exogenous increases in foreign competition affect firms' earnings management behavior, using import tariff reductions as a natural experiment. Using a Difference-in-Differences framework, we find a significant increase in earnings management (and financial restatements) after...

The 2007 Property Law in China checked the power of local governments to expropriate the assets of private firms and it gave creditors (primarily banks) more rights over the assets underlying their secured loans to private firms. We use the property law as a natural experiment for understanding...

Building on the important study by Beck, Demirguc-Kunt and Maksimovic (2005, Journal of Finance), we examine how government intervention in firms' decision-making is related to their investment and sales growth. Using the unique World Bank dataset (WBES) covering 6,500 firms in 70 countries, we...

We study how consumers trade off digital versus in-person banking services and how consumer demand impacts bank technology choices. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as a laboratory, where pandemic risk raised the cost of in-person bank services. After the cost of in-person banking rises, customers,...

Do shareholder protection laws affect the corporate cost of capital? To identify the causal impact of shareholder protection laws on firms’ implied cost of capital, we exploit the staggered adoption across 23 U.S. states of universal demand (UD) laws, which place significant obstacles to...

Roughly 60% of all publically announced advisors to China’s “Going Out” M&A transactions from 2000 to 2014 were from international financial centres (representing over 70% of deal value). Why did advisors, located so far away from both acquirer and target, manage to dominate the M&A...