The term “financial psychopath” was coined after the financial crisis of 2007−2008. Intended as a term of derision, the media used it to negatively label financial professionals, rather than to draw a clinical profile. The expression succinctly conveys the widespread post−2008 public...

Standard or traditional finance research is based on the rational choice model that assumes market participants are fully rational, unbiased, emotionless, self-interested maximizers of expected utility. Recent research in behavioral finance recognizes that real-world investors and managers are...

The historic financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 seriously affected investors. In general, stock market values declined by about 50 percent but largely recovered from pre-crisis levels by the end of 2012 due in part to unprecedented stimulus efforts. Nonetheless, the cumulative return on stocks...

How do financial market conditions affect real economic performance? Empirical investigations of this question have often relied on measures of external financial dependence (EFD) that are constructed using US data and applied to other countries under the assumption of a stable industry ranking...

This paper studies corporate performance in the aftermath of the global crisis by examining 6,581 manufacturing firms in 48 developed and developing countries in 2010, identifying factors of resilience as well as vulnerability. Based on a cross-sectional analysis, the results show that...

We characterize the changes in credit quality of a large sample of listed Indian corporates. Multiple indicators suggest that credit quality declines sharply between 2010 and 2015, creating a thick tail of vulnerable corporate debt. Stress is primarily due to a sharp contraction in aggregate...

We survey CFOs throughout the COVID-19 crisis to learn how multiple dimensions of corporate flexibility affect their short- and long-term business plans. We find that i) workplace flexibility, namely the ability for employees to work remotely, plays a central role in modulating firms’...

How do financial market conditions affect real economic performance? Empirical investigations of this question have often relied on measures of external financial dependence (EFD) that are constructed using U.S. data and applied to other countries under the assumption of a stable industry...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the substitution hypothesis between trade indebtedness and bank loans, based on a sample of 245,000 Italian firms for the period 2010-15, when episodes of bank credit contraction occurred. The econometric approach is based on a shift-and-share IV...