Firms with good management practices optimize and synthesize human resources, leadership, and technical and conceptual skills to enhance firm value. In this paper, we examine the role of management practices in merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions. M&A decisions are among the most important...

Using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier models, we introduce a new country-month index of efficiency of government policy in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our indices are in respect of 81 countries and cover the period from May 2020 to March 2021. Our framework assumes that...

The role of a bank advisor is especially important for guiding and counseling financially distressed individuals. Using a randomized controlled survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of French individuals and priming the financial vulnerability of half the respondents, we examine...

The nexus between ownership and competition in the banking sector is a major concern to policymakers around the world but one that is rarely comprehensively examined. For 131 countries and 13 years we match bank ownership with over 50,000 bank-year estimates of individual bank market power. We...

Using a unique corporate loans dataset for entrepreneurs with small and microenterprises, this paper examines how educational attainment affects bank credit decisions and subsequent individual and firm outcomes. Our results highlight a "Matthew Effect," where an initial advantage is...

We contend that economic preferences over risk-taking in different subnational regions worldwide affect fundamental aspects of firms’ corporate financing, namely financing costs and capital structure. We study this hypothesis, by hand-matching firms’ regions worldwide with the corresponding...