Several commentators have argued that financial “reform” legislation enacted after a market crash is invariably flawed, results in “quack corporate governance” and “bubble laws,” and should be discouraged. This criticism has been specifically directed at both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act...

In this study, we examine how banks' stock price crash risk is affected by recourse uncertainty embedded in securitizations. By recourse uncertainty, we mean the difficulty for equity market participants to assess the true extent of risk transfer between securitizing banks and investors in...

Institutional investors’ common blockholdings within an industry produce an information advantage, allowing them to differentiate between the industry-wide and firm-specific nature of bad news released by peer firms and avoiding selling on false spillover signals (i.e., “panic exit”),...

This paper analyzes whether the financial distress of a firm affects the investment decisions of non-distressed competitors. On average, firms in distress impose indirect costs to non-distressed competitors by increasing costs of credit in the industry and hence restricting credit access and...

How does asset encumbrance affect the fragility of intermediaries subject to rollover risk? We offer a model in which a bank issues covered bonds backed by a pool of assets that is bankruptcy remote and replenished following losses. Encumbering assets allows a bank to raise cheap secured debt...