Research Question/Issue: The level and effectiveness of investors' protection is considered to foster financial markets development and economic growth. While previous studies focused on the relationship between the institutional setting and investors' protection at country level, we investigate...

We investigate bank opaqueness by looking at the frequency of large, negative, market-adjusted returns (crashes). We analyze crashes on a sample of US stocks traded in the 1990-2007 period. Jin and Myers (2006) predict that opaqueness coupled with weak investors' protection generate more...

A model is presented that shows when (Basel Accord) capital standards and (FDIC) insurance premiums primarily reflect a bank's physical expected default losses, a bank can increase its shareholder value by making loans and investing in bonds that have relatively high systematic risk. Such an...

We evaluate the impact of government ownership on the issuer and individual ratings of a sample of 224 large European banks over the 1999-2004 period. Individual ratings differ from traditional ones in that they focus on banks' economic and financial conditions and do not take into account any...

We use cross country data on a sample of 210 large Western European banks during the ten year period from 2000 to 2009 to evaluate the impact of government ownership on bank risk and lending activity across the economic and political cycles. Three main results emerge from our analysis. First,...