Over the past three decades, the financial system has been going through a historical phase of major structural change. This paper traces the implications of this financial revolution for the dynamics of financial distress and for policy. It argues that, despite this revolution, some fundamental...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To assess the likely evolution of nonfinancial corporate performance going forward, this paper investigates empirically the impact of past pandemics using firm-level data on more than 537,000 companies...

The concept of a market portfolio plays an important role in many financial theories and models. Knowledge of each asset's share of the invested capital markets is both useful information and a good starting point for investors considering the appropriate allocation to the asset. In our latest...

We investigate execution quality issues in the OTC single-name credit default swap (CDS) market using confidential transactions-level trade repository data. Specifically, we analyze the impact of counterparties' matching and negotiation abilities on the terms of trade of CDS contracts, under...

We examine the determinants of financial development using our global sample and employing a rich set of measures of financial development that assess the degree of depth, access, stability and efficiency of financial intermediaries. We use Bayesian model averaging to test competing theories...

This paper argues that the ongoing financial and economic crisis creates an opportunity for economic geography to move to a centre stage of academic debates about the nature of contemporary capitalism. Such a ‘newer' economic geography needs to start by injecting finance and financialisation...

This paper examines the importance of governance transparency as a foundation of modern finance and the national institutions of effective capitalism. Governance transparency has two major components, self-dealing transparency and corporate ownership transparency. Governance transparency reduces...

Prior literature contending that corporate governance in Asia is poor ignores disclosure of self-dealing. This paper overcomes this deficiency as it examines the determinants of measures against self-dealing in business transactions in sixty countries, focusing especially on Asian countries...

We examine whether investor protection affects capital markets in terms of the development of corporate bond markets versus that of equity markets. Using a dataset of 42 countries, we show that in countries with stronger creditor rights, corporate bond markets are more developed than equity...

A closet indexer is more likely to meet a value-weighted investment benchmark by value-weighting the portfolio. Following this intuition, we introduce a simple measure of active management, the absolute difference between the value weights and the actual weights held by a fund, averaged across...