The 10-year Treasury rate has long been considered the primary determinant of 30-year mortgage interest rates. The contemporaneous 10-year LIBOR swap rate is shown to better explain the contemporaneous mortgage rate than the contemporaneous 10-year Treasury rate. This result appears to hold over...

This study ranks 15 leading finance journals by the average number of Social Sciences Citation Index cites per articles for articles published in 1996. It also defines a “top article,” compared to an “article in a top journal.” Using different criteria for top articles, I examine the...

Risk-shifting window dressing and a preferred habitat for liquidity have been offered as possible explanations as to why US money market rates are higher before the year-end than afterwards. The two hypotheses differ in the timing of the rate decline at the year-end and the evidence on the...

This paper examines the impact of the current financial crisis on long-term US Treasury yields by testing the impact of a series of events from December 2007 to March 2009 on the spread between 10-year USD LIBOR swap and 10-year US Treasury (constant maturity) rates to measure risk associated...

This paper examines the effects of bank corporate governance on real estate lending and loan losses during the recent financial crisis. The results indicate that banks with stronger corporate governance mechanisms had higher profitability during the period 2006–2009. Our findings on the...

We extend existing real‐option theories by incorporating the stochastic interaction between unit price and cost, applied in commercial bank lending. We further empirically examine an implication derived from the model as to the relationship between lending practices in the banking industry and...