We examine the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the financial reporting quality of US firms over 1999-2015. Using accruals-based earnings management as a proxy for financial reporting quality and the index of Baker et al. (2016) as an EPU measure we show that they exhibit a...

We show that tax enforcement benefits US firms that borrow from banks. Using data on syndicated loans over the 1993-2017 period, we find that higher IRS audit probabilities exert a negative and significant effect on the cost of loans. The baseline estimates show that a one standard deviation...

Using a conviction-based measure, we find that local (state-level) public corruption exerts a negative effect on the lending activity of US banks. Our baseline estimations show that the difference in public corruption between, e.g., Alabama, where corruption is high, and Minnesota, where...

We investigate how the cultural heritage of the CEOs of banks acting as lead lenders in the US syndicated loan market shapes the relationship between public corruption and the cost of bank loans. We find strong evidence that banks led by CEOs originating from higher uncertainty avoidance...

We explore how bank CEOs' cultural heritage shapes the nexus between lending relationships and the cost of bank loans in the US syndicated loans market. We show that banks led by CEOs that trace their origin in more individualistic and masculine societies are less inclined to share with their...

This paper examines the impact of economic freedom on the cost of bank loans using a sample of 30,644 bank-loan observations in 50 US states over the period 1991–2018. We find that greater economic freedom has been consistently linked to lower loan spreads. Digging deeper into the components...