This paper explores a puzzling historical trend in US-listed firms: Between 1950 and 2018, firm-specific stock price crashes rose from 5.5% to an astonishing 27%. Most of the literature attributes such crashes to agency reasons, i.e., executives camouflaging bad news via financial reporting...

This study uses 469,816 monthly observations of US public firms for the period 1990-2018 to document a strong positive relationship between short-term changes in financial distress risk and future stock price crashes. This result is economically significant as a one interquartile increase of the...

Contrary to public perception and previous literature on public bailout subsidies, we find over the recent 43-year period equityholders in big banks paid fairly for TBTF bailout insurance in terms of equity returns. In normal (non-crisis) periods, after TBTF in 1984, big banks pay an...

We study lottery behavior in banking stocks and use MAX/MIN to capture loss protection from bank bailout guarantees. We find that bank lottery preferences lead to lower short-term returns and that regulatory TARP assistance increases the likelihood of bank lotteryness and risk taking....