We study whether bank CEO optimism (optimistic bank) plays a role in technological progress. We find that optimistic banks lend more to smaller/riskier firms and charge higher loan spreads to compensate for the higher risk exposures. More interestingly, these optimistic banks prefer lending to...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the transparency of banks and the fragility of the banking system. We show that information-based bank runs may be inefficient because the deposit contract designed to provide liquidity induces depositors to have excessive incentives to...

This paper demonstrates that, even if depositors are fully rational and always choose the Pareto dominant equilibrium when there are multiple equilibria, a bank run may still occur when depositors' expectations of the bank's fundamentals do not change. More specifically, a bank run may occur...

We show that firms with a skillful management team tend to disclose more accounting information than other comparable firms. We explore several channels to explain this finding. First, we find that investors treat the disclosure of skillful management team as more credible. In particular,...

Using religious festivals in Taiwan as repeated natural experiments, we examine whether the religious beliefs of individual investors influence their trading behaviors. Based on the assumption that religious festivals draw superstitious individual investors participating and make them feel lucky...

We identify the endogenous social effects proposed by Manski (1993) in firm R&D spending. By using state-level Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) enactments as exogenous shocks, we find that focal firms respond positively to peers' R&D expenditure. The results suggest that managerial learning and...

This paper proposes that whether interconnectedness among banks leads to financial instability depends on banks' leverage decisions. It extends the network model in Allen et al. (2012) to study the relationship between interconnectedness and the banks' failure probability. In the model, banks...

We examine whether rival CEOs’ overconfidence influences a focal firm’s research and development (R&D) expenditure. We propose a stylized model based on an R&D competition game with CEOs having a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preference. Our model predicts that the overconfidence level of...

This paper demonstrates that subordinated debt (‘subdebt’ thereafter) regulation can be an effective mechanism for disciplining banks. Under our proposal, investors buy the subdebt of a bank only if they receive favourable information about the bank, and the bank is subject to a regulatory...