Two recent papers examine the impact of corporate bankruptcy laws on new business start-ups in 29 countries over 1990 - 2008 (Peng et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2010). In this commentary, I briefly point out two significant issues which future researchers might want to consider. First, several countries...

We examine how equity-market frictions that restrict pessimistic trading, such as short-sale constraints, affect assessments of default risk. We find that these frictions decrease the usefulness of equity-market variables for identifying defaulting firms but increase their usefulness for...

This paper examines local bias in the context of venture capital (VC) investments. Based on a sample of US VC investments between 1980 and June 2009, we find more reputable VCs (older, larger, more experienced, and with stronger IPO track record) and VCs with broader networks exhibit less local...

The study aims to investigate the impact of credit growth on the Maastricht criteria targeting process in the new member states of the European Union. The methodological framework is based on a two-compenent transmission mechanism represented by the output gap and the nonperforming loans. The...

We formulate a Cournot-type market equilibrium model of simultaneous trading in the CDS and Loan CDS (LCDS) markets. We use novel formulations of two-market demand functions that include trading costs and margins. The equilibrium identifies a relation between premiums, elasticities and recovery...

This study has two objectives, first, to investigate if the lending behaviour of banks exhibits moral hazard in the Indian Banking Industry, and second, to investigate whether banks’ moral hazard behaviour changes when the systemic importance of the banks is taken into consideration. We...

We show that Quantitative Easing (QE) stimulates investment via a corporate-bond lending channel. Fed's large-scale asset purchases of MBS and treasuries through QE creates a vacuum of safe assets, prompting safer firms to invest more by issuing relatively "safe'' bonds. Using micro-data around...

AI artificial intelligence brings about new quantitative techniques to assess the state of an economy. Here we describe a new measure for systemic risk: the Financial Risk Meter (FRM). This measure is based on the penalization parameter (λ) of a linear quantile lasso regression. The FRM is...

This paper estimates the exogenous effect of schooling on reduced incidence of hypertension. Using the changes in the minimum school-leaving age law in the United Kingdom from age 14 to 15 in 1947, and from age 15 to 16 in 1973, as sources of exogenous variation in schooling, the regression...

In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries...