Starting in the early 1990s, banks began to slowly make their way into securities underwriting using their Section 20 subsidiaries. With the enactment of the Gram-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, the long-standing restrictions between commercial- and investment-banking activities were formally removed....

Are companies with traded credit default swap (CDS) positions on their debt more likely to default? Using a proportional hazard model of bankruptcy and Merton's contingent claims approach, we estimate the probability of default for U.S. nonfinancial firms. Our analysis does not generally find a...

Limbo loans are defined as delinquent mortgage loans that have not progressed to resolution. We utilize a unique legal database for Florida and find no support for resolution delays from bottlenecks or bank capital constraints. Instead, the impairment of property rights explains both the...

In this paper, we use methods from social network analysis to assess the relative importance of financial centers around the world. Using data from virtually the entire universe of global equity activity, we present two sets of complete rankings for up to forty-five separate locations for the...

A large fraction of the companies that went private between 1990 and 2007 were fairly young public firms, often with the same management team making the crucial restructuring decisions both at the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and the buyout. Why did these public firms decide to...

We investigate whether the “stress test,” the extraordinary examination of the nineteen largest U.S. bank holding companies conducted by federal bank supervisors in 2009, produced information demanded by the market. Using standard event study techniques, we find that the market had largely...