In this study, we analyze the firm's choice of legal form of organization (“LFO”). We find that only about one in three firms begins operations as a proprietorship, while almost as many begin as limited liability companies and as corporations. Moreover, this distribution is remarkably stable...

We identify and analyze a sample of publicly traded Chinese firms that issued loan guarantees to their related parties (usually the controlling block holders), thereby expropriating wealth from minority shareholders. Our results show that the issuance of related guarantees is less likely at...

Commercial real estate makes up a relatively small percentage of most institutional portfolios, even though the existing literature has consistently reported attractive risk-return characteristics that would suggest much larger allocations. The discrepancy has been explained by a perceived lack...

Restrictions on stock ownership may harm a company's performance because restrictions prevent owners from choosing an optimal structure. We examine the stock-price performance and ownership structure of a sample of thrift institutions that converted from mutual to stock ownership. We find that,...

The informational opacity of small businesses makes them an interesting area for the study of banks' lending practices and procedures. We use data from a survey of small businesses to analyze the micro-level differences in the loan-approval processes of large and small banks. We provide evidence...

This study uses a two-factor market-model to estimate excess returns around 43 announcements of FSLIC-assisted thrift mergers and 66 announcements of unassisted thrift mergers. These estimated excess returns are then used to test hypotheses about asymmetric-information and principal-agent...

This article examines the determinants of both book-value insolvency and regulatory closure in the thrift industry. Agency theory suggests that the determinants of insolvency and closure are a function of conflicts between shareholders and creditors, shareholders and managers, and regulators and...

The recent consolidation in the banking system has focused attention on the difference in lending between large and small banks, since large banks lend proportionally less to small business. We use a newly available survey of small business finances conducted by the Federal Reserve System to...

Previous research has established (i) that a country's financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking...

We examine the usage of debt by small firms trading on the over-the-counter (OTC) market and filing annual reports with the SEC. Similar to firms included in the Survey of Small Business Finance, the small OTC firms in our sample are more dependent on debt financing than firms listed on the NYSE...