In theory commercial banks exist to resolve asymmetric information problems in credit markets. Because small business firms have much greater information problems than large firms, it is not surprising that they depend almost entirely on banks for external finance needs. Unfortunately, little is...

The inability of most bank merger studies to control for hidden bailouts may lead to biased results. In this study, we employ a unique data set of approximately 1,000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use data on the regulatory intervention history to distinguish between...

In this paper, we show the importance of accounting for heterogeneity among sample firms in stochastic frontier analysis. For a fairly homogenous sample of German savings and cooperative banks, we analyze how alternative theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of heterogeneity can be...

In a recent book, Kolari et al. developed a new theoretical capital asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM. Based on out-of-sample cross-sectional tests using U.S. stocks, the ZCAPM consistently outperformed well-known multifactor models popular in the finance literature. This paper presents...

This paper combines the CRSP market index with multiple factors to create a single multifactor market index. Empirical tests of different multifactor market indexes indicate that: (1) Sharpe ratios substantially increase and GRS test statistics decrease as multifactors are incrementally added to...

The informed options trading hypothesis posits that option prices lead stock prices. In this paper, we extended the research on this hypothesis to open-market share repurchases. Empirical tests showed that the implied volatility spread was not significantly related to buy-and-hold abnormal stock...

This study explores the dependency structure of S&P 500 survivor stocks. Using a hand-collected sample of stocks that survived in the S&P 500 since March 1957, we employ rescaled/range analysis to investigate survivors. First, we find nonlinearities in the return processes of survivor stocks due...

Two alternative research hypotheses concerning how small business lending affects bank profitability are tested. The specialization hypothesis argues for higher profitability than other banks due to increased focus on small business lending, whereas the diversification hypothesis Two alternative...