Do shareholder protection laws affect the corporate cost of capital? To identify the causal impact of shareholder protection laws on firms’ implied cost of capital, we exploit the staggered adoption across 23 U.S. states of universal demand (UD) laws, which place significant obstacles to...

Exploiting 150 million points of purchase by US households, we examine how negative ESG shocks ripple through product market and shape consumption. We show that the sales of affected products drop by an average of 5 - 10%, comparing with that of unaffected products consumed by the same...

We examine how a firm's bankruptcy affects the bank financing costs of its key suppliers. We do so by using an extensive, hand-collected data set that captures the supply chain relationships of bankrupt firms over the time period 1990-2009. Looking at a sample of more than 2000 loan contracts,...

Building on the pioneering study by Beck, Demirguc-Kunt and Levine (2006), we examine the effects of media ownership and concentration on corruption in bank lending. Using the unique World Bank dataset covering more than 5,000 firms across 59 countries, we find strong evidence that that state...

Looking at a sample of nearly 2,400 banks in 69 countries, we find that stronger creditor rights tend to promote greater bank risk taking. Consistent with this finding, we also show that stronger creditor rights increase the likelihood of financial crisis. On the plus side, we find that stronger...