Purpose – Title III of the USA Patriot Act obligated the private sector to take a more active role in deterring money laundering and disrupting terrorist financing. Complying with the new law has increased the cost of doing business dramatically for firms in the financial services industry....

The financial crisis of 2008 had a profound effect on the US banking industry, causing financial distress and the failure of a large number of banks. In this paper, we investigate whether or not banking institutions smoothed their reported earnings upward through the utilization of loan loss...

In this paper, we test whether or not banking regulators have followed a risk-based approach in the enforcement of the USA Patriot Act's anti-money laundering (AML) provisions. In order to do so, we compare the financial performances of banking institutions operating branches inside and outside...