We study how Small Business Administration (SBA) employees respond to salient defaults. Using novel data to identify employees transferring across SBA offices, we find that defaults on SBA loans in their previous workplace reduce SBA loans in their current workplace. The effect is independent of...

From European integration to domestic politics to the development of the global economy, technocracy and private ordering have shaped economic behaviour. Such transformative private-driven forces of economic activity flourished through the promulgation of voluntary standards. In view of the...

Despite a heated debate on the perceived increasing complexity of financial regulation, there is no available measure of regulatory complexity other than the mere length of regulatory documents. To fill this gap, we propose to apply simple measures from the computer science literature by...

The annual percentage rate of charge (APRC) designed to reflect all costs of borrowing is a widely used measure to compare different credit products. It disregards completely, however, risks of possible future changes in interest and exchange rates. As an unintended consequence of the general...

Mutual funds have traditionally attracted retail investors seeking diversified market exposure. While the focus has historically been on asset liquidity and quality, recent attention has turned to assessing fund liquidity and the risks of asset fire sales. Our study analyzes Israeli mutual...

I show that rules designed to reduce high debt-to-income mortgage lending restrict self-employed households' access to credit and reduce entrepreneurship. I identify the effects of a recent policy by using local variation in exposure to banks subject to the regulation. The policy reduced...

This chapter for the Encyclopedia of Labor and Employment Law and Economics, discusses government regulation of the labor market in the 21st Century, with a particular emphasis on the need to maintain competitiveness in an era of globalization. The chapter first considers the 'race to the...

We present evidence that, following the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, firms responded to the increased requirement for outside director monitoring by substituting insiders with outside directors who have social or professional connections to their CEOs. This substitution was most...

Purpose: As investors' fear have an impact on their risk-return tradeoff, this fear leaves markets susceptible to sudden and large fluctuations. Markets develop a long- run normal and regulatory actions should be different for non-normal trading days. Regulators should amend their precautionary...

A large number of empirical studies pointed to the ongoing expansion of the shadow economy in many countries around the globe. A robust finding in these studies is the positive association between unemployment rates and the size of the unofficial sector. However, with consistent estimates of the...