Purpose: The exact criteria used by state governors for choosing opportunity zones (OZs) are not publicly available. This paper aims to examine whether state governors selected the most distressed communities, or those with the highest proportions of minorities, as OZs....

This paper is the first paper to provide a comprehensive review of the US regulatory treatment of a relatively recent and controversial source of funds, namely brokered deposits. To do this, we consider the extent to which banks rely on brokered deposits, as well as the impact of these funds on...

This study investigates the relationship between local culture, as measured by religiosity, and dividend payouts based on a sample of 155 Italian firms over the period 2000-2016, yielding 2,382 firm-year observations. We find a significantly positive relationship between religiosity and dividend...

We analyze the optimal capital structure of a nation from a corporate finance perspective. In particular, we draw an analogy between a nation's fiat money and corporate equity following Bolton and Huang (2018). Based on dynamic capital structure theory, we develop a stochastic model to determine...

Natural disasters are not rare and costless events. Indeed, the evidence indicates there has been an acceleration in the number of disasters and the associated costs over the past century. Such disasters can cause severe property damage in the communities affected. Typically, insurance policies...

In this paper, we examine the differences between commercially-owned ILCs and those owned by financial firms, and offer a current assessment of ILC performance, paying particular attention to commercially-owned ILCs, and their contribution to the US banking system. The rules governing their...

Ten states and the District of Columbia prohibit the operation of payday loan stores, and thirty-one other states have imposed regulatory restraints on the controversial industry, ranging, for example, from caps on fees and loan amounts to the number of rollovers and renewals a borrower may...