In Japan, since 2013, Japanese corporate governance reform has been developed by Japanese Government initiatives. This paper provides a theoretical framework for understanding what Japanese corporate governance reform means for Japanese companies by an application of agency theory. Corporate...

Fraud and irrationality are often blamed for financial manias and panics. Investor euphoria can unleash social and technological breakthroughs, but the subsequent failures can destroy value and radicalize the political sphere. Are these events random, idiosyncratic, or driven by some force? The...

EU policy-makers have focused on the creation of a “Capital Market Union” to advance the economic vitality of the EU in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 and the Eurozone crisis of 2011-13. The hope is that EU-wide capital markets will help remedy the limitations in the...

We document two puzzling facts during the 1918–19 influenza outbreak. First, we find no significant differences among US life insurers' profitability before or after 1918. Second, there are fewer insurers in distress after the outbreak. We argue that an increase in insurance demand offset...

This paper exploits a natural experiment from the late 1800s in which many U.S. firms had inadvertently issued both taxable and tax-exempt bonds. Investors paid income tax on taxable bonds, but firms covered income tax on investors' behalf on tax-exempt bonds. Using a unique data-set of these...

This article covers examples of successful futures contracts that responded to new large-scale commercial risks over the past 170 years. The article explains the new commercial circumstances that ushered in the intense need for hedging instruments, spanning the grain, financial, crude oil, and...

Bank regulators consider minimum capital standards essential for promoting well-functioning banking systems. Despite their existence, however, such standards have been insufficient to prevent periodic disruptions in the banking sectors of various countries. The most recent disruption was the...

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the U.S. financial system became more inclusive but subtle forms of financial discrimination remained, though they were difficult to prove statistically. Instead of reducing the residue of recalcitrant discrimination, regulators in the...

The objective of this paper is to examine the absolute and risk-adjusted effects on distribution rates and total wealth created by adding loss-limiting trend following strategies to buy and hold portfolios. Using 150 years of equity and bond data, we found that applying trend following to...

Annual time series data show that from 1790 through 2010 only about 1 percent of U.S. commercial banks failed each year on average. Many community banks, including mutual savings banks and local commercial banks, provided valuable intermediation services for decades before failing or, more...