Amid an economic downturn caused in part by financial deregulation, it is odd to most people outside the Beltway that Congress should be actively considering (and indeed have passed in the House) a raft of proposal for more financial deregulation. Yet the politics for both parties require...

This study examines the relation of independent directors and their gender diversity, busyness, and experience with risk taking for 112 listed US insurance companies over 2003- 2010. Using OLS, system GMM and 3SLS, we find that board independence, females amongst independent directors and busy...

Many studies use country-specific evidence to investigate research questions of broad interest due to research advantages of a given country, such as data availability or to exploit an exogenous event that allows identification. One such research stream examines Canadian directors' and officers'...

This study examines the relation of independent directors and their gender diversity, busyness, and experience with risk taking for 112 listed US insurance companies over 2003-2010. Using OLS, system GMM and 3SLS, we find that board independence, females amongst independent directors and busy...

This study examines the relation of incentives and risk taking for 104 listed U.S. insurance companies over 2006-2010. Our results show that independent director compensation is positively related to risk taking as are CEO compensation and institutional ownership. Besides dollar value and...

We examine the relation between executive compensation and market-implied default risk for listed insurance firms from 1992-2007. Shareholders are expected to encourage managerial risk-sharing through equity-based incentive compensation. We find that long-term incentives and other share-based...

We investigate the determinants of firms' implicit insurance to employees, using a difference-indifference approach: we rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and exploit variation in unemployment insurance across and within countries to...

Prior research shows that Dodd-Frank Act's regulations on credit rating agencies (CRAs) increase rated firms' risk of rating downgrades, regardless of their credit quality (see Dimitrov, Palia and Tang (2015)). Our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that after Dodd-Frank, low-rated...

We provide evidence that managerial incentives to manipulate real activities can influence the effectiveness of fiscal policy. Increases in federal spending lead government-dependent firms to expand R&D investment whereas industry-peer firms contract. The net result is a reduction in...

Despite extensive efforts, the relation between tax incentives and corporate capital structure is an open question. The 2017 US tax reform creates an opportunity to directly estimate this relation. The reform limits the tax advantage of debt for all firms except for small businesses with average...