When investment banks advise on merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions, are they fiduciaries of their clients, gatekeepers for investors, or simply arm's-length counterparties with no other-regarding duties? Scholars have generally treated M&A advisors as arm's-length counterparties, putting...

As the world-wide financial crisis of 2008 morphs into what many suspect will be a deep and sustained global recession, pundits and policymakers lament the excesses that resulted in the systemically significant overleveraging of the household sector. Not long ago, many of the same people whose...

Since increasing a bank's capital requirement to improve the stability of the financial system imposes costs upon the bank, a regulator should ideally be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that banks classified as systemically risky really do create systemic risk before subjecting them to...

In 1865, the first minority bank in the United States was established. Over time, banks owned or controlled by minorities have grown in number. Yet, one hundred and fifty years later, they still account for only 2.8 percent of all banks. The contribution of this paper is fourfold. First, it...

Discrimination in lending can occur either in face-to-face decisions or in algorithmic scoring. We provide a workable interpretation of the courts' legitimate-business-necessity defense of statistical discrimination. We then estimate the extent of racial/ethnic discrimination in the largest...

Bank stability depends critically on the ability to connect and retain customers amid negative shocks. This study proposes a novel measure of accumulated customer capital at the branch level. In a within bank-county estimation, we exploit reputation damage as exogenous negative shocks to...