During the past two decades, the fraction of the world's initial public offerings (IPOs) accounted for by U.S. firms has fallen sharply. This decrease is attributed to higher IPO activity outside the U.S. and lower IPO activity in the U.S. We show that financial globalization has played a major...

Much attention has been paid to the large decreases in value of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the financial crisis. Many observers have argued that the fall in prices was partly driven by decreased liquidity and fire sales. We investigate whether capital...

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

We investigate whether a bank's performance during the 1998 crisis, which was viewed at the time as the most dramatic crisis since the Great Depression, predicts its performance during the recent financial crisis. One hypothesis is that a bank that has an especially poor experience in a crisis...

We investigate whether bank performance during the credit crisis of 2008 is related to CEO incentives and share ownership before the crisis and whether CEOs reduced their equity stakes in their banks in anticipation of the crisis. There is no evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were...

This paper investigates Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deregistrations by foreign firms from the time the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed in 2002 through 2008. We test two theories, the bonding theory and the loss of competitiveness theory, to understand why foreign firms leave...

Though overall bank performance from July 2007 to December 2008 was the worst since at least the Great Depression, there is significant variation in the cross-section of stock returns of large banks across the world during that period. We use this variation to evaluate the importance of factors...

Many observers have argued that credit default swaps contributed significantly to the credit crisis. Of particular concern to these observers are that credit default swaps trade in the largely unregulated over-the-counter market as bilateral contracts involving counterparty risk and that they...

Using a large panel of firms across the world from 1991-2006, we show that the median foreign firm has lower idiosyncratic risk than a comparable U.S. firm. Country characteristics help explain variation in the level of idiosyncratic risk, but less so than firm characteristics. Idiosyncratic...

Not all stock recommendation changes are equal. In a sample constructed to minimize the impact of confounding news, relatively few analyst recommendation changes are influential in the sense that they impact investors’ beliefs about a firm in a way that could be noticed in that firm’s stock...