The contributors – top international scholars from finance, law and business – explore the role of governance, both internal and external, in explaining risk-taking and other aspects of the behavior of financial institutions. Additionally, they discuss market and policy features affecting...

During the 2008-2009 financial crisis, firms with high social capital, measured as corporate social responsibility (CSR) intensity, had stock returns that were four to seven percentage points higher than firms with low social capital. High-CSR firms also experienced higher profitability, growth,...

This study examines whether ESG (environmental, social and governance) disclosure influences firm-specific crash risk. Our main research hypothesis postulates that further information disclosure about ESG activities and risks mitigates crash risk by virtue of lower opacity and information...

In this paper, we analyse whether bank owners or bank managers were the driving force behind the risks incurred in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. We show that owner controlled banks had higher profits in the years before the crisis, and incurred larger losses and were more likely...

We study how generalized trust shapes the ability of firms with different ownership forms to obtain trade financing and perform during a financial crisis. Exploiting geographic variations in trust across Italian regions and the occurrence of the 2008-09 financial crisis in a...

We investigate the value of stable ownership for a large sample of European firms from 2005 to 2010, using the global financial crisis as an exogenous shock and using pre-and post-crisis periods as benchmarks. Controlling for ownership concentration, we find that stable blockholder ownership...