On September 29, 2008 - two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the government of Ireland took the bold step of guaranteeing almost all liabilities of the country’s major banks.  The total amount guaranteed by the government was more than double Ireland’s gross domestic product,...

For financial regulators seeking to use regulatory requirements to manage risk in a banking system, there can be a concern that such requirements crowd out efforts by banks to develop their own risk management systems.  One way in which regulators have attempted to solve this problem is to...

From the earliest efforts to mandate the amount of capital banks must maintain, regulators have grappled with how best to accomplish this task. Until the 1980s, regulation had been based largely on discretion and judgment. In the wake of two bank failures, the central bank governors of the G10...

This paper examines the information embedded in both the stock and option markets prior to takeover announcements. During normal periods, buyer-seller initiated stock volume imbalances are significant predictors of next-day stock returns and option volume imbalances are uninformative. However,...

This paper parsimoniously characterizes how past returns affect the cross-section of expected returns. Using Fama-MacBeth regressions, it shows that the momentum and reversals associated with past returns over va

Despite the interest in measuring price sensitivity of online consumers, most academic work on Internet commerce is hindered by a lack of data on quality. In this paper we use publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online...

This paper proposes a new approach of valuing portfolios that contain illiquid assets. The approach has three major advantages. First, the estimators are arithmetic averages of individual asset returns or their proxies, so they strictly correspond to actual portfolio returns. Second, the...

Our model assumes that creditors need to expend resources to collect on claims. Consequently, because diffuse creditors suffer from mutual free-riding (Holmstrom (1982)), they fare worse than concentrated creditors (e.g. a house bank). The model predicts that measures of debt concentration...

We use an iterative relocation algorithm to identify factors in common stock returns. The benefit of the approach is that factors are portfolios of assets with non-negative weights. As a result, they are readily interpretable in terms of the characteristics of the underlying securities. The...

This paper explores the relationship between nonprofit board governance practices and government contracting. Monitoring by a board is one way a governmental agency can help to insure quality performance by its contractors. Agencies could thus use both their selection process and their...