This paper investigates the economic consequences of firms connected to organized crime (criminal firms) and shows that when a criminal firm is eliminated from an industry, the performance of non-criminal competitors significantly increases. We also show that the positive effect on the...

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005 significantly expanded the exemptions from the normal workings of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Using a large sample of U.S. banks we study investors' reaction to news about the promulgation of the BAPCPA repo ‘safe...

Using branch-level data on public and private U.S. banking institutions we investigate the importance of branch religiosity in shaping bank risk-taking behavior. Our results show robust evidence that branch religiosity is negatively related to bank risk-taking. This effect persists after...

The paper investigates the role of CEO's equity and risk incentives in boosting securitization in the financial industry and in motivating executives to reduce the perceived risk while betting on it. Using a sample of US financial institutions over the period 2003-2009 we document that CEOs with...

In this paper, we develop and test the hypothesis that tax repatriation costs increase the uncertainty embedded in cash holdings. The intuition behind our empirical prediction relies on the notion that tax repatriation costs are a strong indication that part of the cash is not available to...

We study whether commonality of incentives and opportunity to commit fraud triggers reputational contagion from culpable firms to nonculpable firms. Relying on a sample of 30 banks involved in fixing the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and a control sample of 30 banks, we find that banks'...