Multiple shocks have led regulators and policy makers to put increasing faith in the diagnostic and prophylactic powers of international financial standards, but the nature, appropriateness and normative force of such standards varies. As a standard setter, the International Organization of...

We conducted a randomized online study of messaging on twitter to encourage retail investors to check the background of their investment professional. Our study tested different tweets attempting to motivate investors by emphasizing aspirations, mistrust, and loss aversion. We found that our...

A more positive cultural trust bias by an equity analyst's country of origin toward a firm's headquarter country is associated with significantly more positive stock recommendations, controlling for analyst-month and firm-month fixed effects. The cultural bias effect is stronger for eponymous...

I propose a new investor sentiment measurement for the private equity market based on over 12,000 private equity deals from 68 countries over 1992 to 2012. The data indicate that institutional environments and firm-specific characteristics are both strong determinants of the private equity...

We find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts, comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies. These differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads, consistent with...

Securitization is a global multi-trillion dollar market that embodies financialization. Prior to the recent financial crisis, securitization fueled an unsustainable increase in mortgage credit. As the recent financial crisis reveals, securitization increased credit market volatility and was...

In China, securitization has been promoted as a means of reducing reliance on the shadow banking system, and to ensure enough credit keeps flowing to a slowing economy. A cure for China's banking woes may in fact be the instrument that nearly brought down the global financial system –...

Traditional pecking-order theory (POT) cannot explain why good-quality firms issue equity: this is often considered to be an empirical puzzle. We build a model of capital structure that has elements of both asymmetric information and behavioral finance. Firms have private information about their...

This study examines whether disruptive life events affect how analysts assess risk. We exploit the staggered arrival of hurricanes between 1996 and 2009 at analysts' office locations across the United States as a plausibly exogenous shock in the analysts' experience of disruptive life events. We...

Securitization is considered to be one of the biggest financial innovations of the last century. It is also regarded as both a catalyst and a solution to the 2008 financial crisis. Once a popular method of financing the mortgage and consumer credit markets, aspects of the global securitization...