This Closer Look illustrates the relation between executive compensation and organizational risk through the context of the financial crisis of 2008. We demonstrate that the incentives that bankers had to increase firm risk not only increased but increased substantially in the years preceding...

We analyze the trading of corporate insiders at leading financial institutions during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. We find strong evidence of a relation between political connections and informed trading during the period in which TARP funds were disbursed, and that the relation is most...

Common systemic risk measures focus on the instantaneous occurrence of triggering and systemic events. However, systemic events may also occur with a time-lag to the triggering event. To study this contagion period and the resulting persistence of institutions' systemic risk we develop and...

The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

This paper shows that institutional sell-side herding increased bid-ask spreads and liquidity risk during the 2007-8 financial crisis. Such an impact on liquidity is most pronounced in firms with large numbers of institutions that sold the same stocks, that is, have correlated trades. For the...

We investigate bank loans' specialness with a particular focus on the recent boom and bust cycle. We perform an empirical analysis using event study methodology on a sample of 253 large loan announcements for French borrowers between January 2000 and December 2009. We find a significant and...

This paper investigates the short selling of financial company stocks around the time of the SEC September 2008 short-selling ban. More specifically, this paper examines whether this short selling, mainly by hedge funds and other types of sophisticated investors, was purely speculative or...

During the financial crisis in 2007-8, the quoted spread for the average S&P 1500 firm increased by 50%, while the systematic liquidity risk increased by 34%. We find that the trading of a firm's equity by institutional investors increased the firms' quoted spreads, and led to a higher liquidity...

This paper examines the relation between bank branch deregulation and corporate borrowers' stock price crash risk. Using a large sample of U.S. public firms over the period 1962-2001, we provide robust evidence that intrastate branch reform reduces firms' stock price crash risk. Our finding is...

In this paper we investigate the price discovery process in single-name credit spreads obtained from bond, credit default swap (CDS), equity and equity option prices. We analyse short term price discovery by modelling daily changes in credit spreads in the four markets with a vector...