We link genetic diversity in the country of origin of the firms' board members with corporate performance via board members' nationality. We hypothesize that our approach captures deep-rooted differences in cultural, institutional, social, psychological, physiological, and other traits that...

This paper investigates the role of technical reserves affecting income smoothing behavior of insurance companies. This is one of the first attempts in the literature to trace such relationship in the insurance industry, especially at a multi-country setting. The experience of 770 insurance...

Using a sample of 1,619 commercial banks from 82 countries we investigate the impact of financial consumer protection policies on bank profit efficiency estimated with a production frontier function. Our results show that more regulatory requirements decrease bank profit efficiency. We confirm...

Stock price synchronicity has been associated with various market outcomes like the return-sentiment relations, stock liquidity, and asset pricing models. Therefore, researchers have devoted a lot of time in revealing the underlying factors that drive stock price synchronicity. Using a sample of...

Using a sample of 50 countries during 2000-2008, this study investigates the possible impact of insurance regulations on life insurance consumption. The evidence reveals a negative and statistically significant association between supervisory control of the policy conditions of life annuities...

There exists a lively debate as for the appropriate architecture of the financial supervision regime, with a long list of theoretical advantages and disadvantages associated with each one of its key dimensions. The present study investigates whether and how bank profit efficiency are influenced...

This study investigates whether capital market values the efficiency of firms. Tracing stock returns and efficiency changes of 399 listed insurance firms in 52 countries during the 2002-2008 period, the paper reports a positive and statistically significant relationship between profit efficiency...

This study uses a sample of foreign and domestic banks operating in Greece during 1999-2004 to examine the impact of ownership on efficiency. We estimate an input oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) model under variable returns to scales with inputs and outputs selected on the basis of a...

In this paper, we investigate the relative performance of both linear and non-linear support vector machines (SVMs) models with a polynomial and an RBF kernel in the development of classification models for the prediction of EU bank acquisition targets. The training sample consists of 274 banks,...