I investigate whether and how personal income taxes impact bank lending to small businesses. My empirical design exploits staggered statutory changes of state personal tax in the U.S. as identification and compares loans granted in geographically adjacent counties across state borders with...

Our paper investigates the nexus between the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) and the market leverage of firms listed on the US stock market. Analyzing the yearly database of non-financial US firms from 2000 to 2019, we find that an increase in the VIX index has a positive impact on the leverage of...

Using a panel of Taiwanese bank data over the period from 1997 to 2010, this paper conducts a joint analysis to examine the static, selection, and dynamic effects of ownership on bank performance. Simultaneously, to determine whether politics have a significant effect on the performance of...

The insurance linked securities (ILS) market is an increasingly important alternative asset class for which risk and return analysis differs from other asset classes. Measures of portfolio risk and return for an ILS portfolio are based on the expected losses and expected excess returns over the...

Joint IMF-World Bank Financial Assessment Program (2008) concluded that Malawian banking industry was plagued with significant ownership linkages and therefore bringing in problems of related party transactions requiring proper disclosures to protect various stakeholders. Regulatory Authorities...

Corporate structures with cross-ownership are common in civil law countries. Nevertheless, existing methods remain unable to evaluate control stakes in such structures. This is because cross-ownership induces circularity, and makes it impossible to identify winning coalitions among shareholders....

Leasing is one of the most important sources of external finance to corporate firms. This paper develops a dynamic model to investigate the role of uncertainty and financial constraint in understanding the leasing decisions of corporate firms. The model predicts that firms with high uncertainty...

We study whether managers' are correct in their perception that investors are myopic towards more ‘innovative' investments, defined in this paper as those in research and development (R&D) and information technology (IT). We first examine the stock market's relative response to investments...

We examine how firm-imposed trading policies affect returns to trades conducted by corporate insiders. A firm's insider trading policy is a specific aspect of corporate governance which ensures and promotes ethical and responsible decision making so that investor confidence and corporate...

In this paper we present an optimization framework that deals with the asset-liability portfolio selection problem. We consider a financial institution that has multiple lines of business. The capital allocation is obtained by minimizing the sum of the expected squared differences between the...