The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and...

The paper investigates the determinants of bank board structure in Ghana and finds that the Scope of Operations Hypothesis could explain the variation in board size but not board independence. On the other hand, the Board Monitoring Hypothesis could only explain the variation in board...

Income smoothing is defined as the deliberate normalization of income in order to reach a desired trend. If the smoothing causes more information to be reflected in the stock price, it is likely to improve the allocation of resources and can be a critical factor in investment decisions. This...

We show that corporate use of long-term debt has decreased in the U.S. over the past three decades and that this trend is heterogeneous across firms. The median percentage of debt maturing in more than three years decreased from 53% in 1976 to 6% in 2008 for the smallest firms, but did not...

In this paper we investigate whether the secondary market trading of syndicated loans compromises the quality of bank lending practices. We compare the performance of borrowers of traded loans following the initial trading event against the performance of borrowers of non-traded loans following...

In this study we examine the relation between corporate governance and institutional ownership. Our empirical results show that the fraction of a company's shares that are held by institutional investors increases with the quality of its governance structure. In a similar vein, we show that the...

This paper examines various concepts related to the topic of corporate risk appetite. It emphasises the need for consistency of definitions and coherence of terminology. Corporate risk appetite articulation is discussed as a corollary to strategy formulation and as an aid to corporate...

An overview of the main elements of Finance theory beginning with Markowitz and applying widely accepted techniques of analysis to financial decisions in companies and investment portfolios. Intended to be accessible to non specialists