We document the negative effect of stock liquidity on default risk for a sample of 46 countries. We further find that default risk declines following the introduction of the Directive on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID)—an exogenous shock that increases liquidity. The effect of...

After the completion of a merger and acquisition (M&A), a number of factors may affect the performance, probability of default and actual delisting of the acquirer. In this paper, we present a simple methodology for identifying risk factors and then proceed to identify and investigate...

In this paper we investigate risk governance in 60 major international financial institutions and its influence on risk (calculated from equity returns). Risk governance has increased significantly during our sample period. We find the following variables to be important in determining risk...

We are the first, with a risk-taking perspective of corporate governance, to investigate the differential effect of corporate governance on downside and upside risk. Intuitively, strong corporate governance should decrease the downside risk but increase the upside risk. However, using a large...

When lenders gain control rights in technical default, they influence corporate operating decisions. We develop a novel measure of operational risk-taking that utilizes industry-specific data on corporate operations. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that borrowers reduce...

We find that powerful chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with higher crash risk. The positive association between CEO power and crash risk holds when controlling for earnings management, tax avoidance, chief executive officer's option incentives, and CEO overconfidence. Firms with...

We find that a firm facing higher uncertainty has a higher value of cash. This effect is attributed to the increased value of the option to wait and see as well as the aggravated financial constraints and mitigated agency conflicts

This study tests two opposing views of institutional investors – monitoring versus expropriation – by investigating whether institutional ownership is positively or negatively related to future firm-specific stock price crash risk. We present robust evidence that institutional ownership is...