We construct a set of household-level background risk variables to capture the covariance structure of three nonfinancial assets and two financial assets. These risks are in general statistically significant and economically important for a household's stock market participation and stock...

Recent corporate scandals have raised considerable concern among regulators and stock market participants about related party transactions (RPTs), prompting Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) to prohibit personal loans to executives and non-executive board members. In a representative sample of companies for...

We analyze the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) on corporate bond ratings issued by credit rating agencies (CRAs). We find no evidence that Dodd-Frank disciplines CRAs to provide more accurate and informative credit ratings. Instead, following...

This paper examines evidence of lending discrimination in prime and subprime mortgage markets in New Jersey. Existing single-equation studies of race-based discrimination in mortgage lending assume race is uncorrelated with the disturbance term in the loan denial regression. At the individual...

This paper suggests that the introduction of bank branching restrictions and federal deposit insurance in the United States likely was motivated by political considerations. Specifically, we argue that these restrictions were instituted for the benefit of the small, unit banks that were unable...

We study the relationship between governance changes and firm characteristics and the impact of governance changes on future firm performance using a sample of firms that make large positive and large negative changes in thirteen governance measures. We find that the governance changes are...