We examine the value effect of working capital management (WCM) for a large sample of US firms between 1982–2011. Our results indicate (i) the existence of an optimal level of working capital policy; and (ii) firms that converge to that optimal level (either by increasing or decreasing their...

Having proved Basel II to be ineffective to prevent the global financial crisis, Basel III seeks to enhance the resilience of individual financial institutions by strengthening their capital buffer and by building counterbalancing capacity to absorb liquidity shocks. Under this new regulatory...

We analyze banks’ pooling of corporate loans and propose Pareto-improving sharing rules that depend only on the relative sizes of the loans. Implementation of these sharing rules do not require any precise knowledge of default probabilities or default correlations.

This paper investigates the contract terms of local versus foreign bank lead loan syndications to test two opposing theories: the home market advantage gained by closer geographical proximity and soft information from existing banking relationships, versus the hold-up problem where banks exploit...

It is well known that firms with low price to earnings ratios (value firms) earn higher stock returns in the long term than high price to earnings firms (growth firms). This study investigates how insider ownership affects this relation. We show that when insider ownership is high, returns...

We generalize existing structural credit risk models that account for contagion effects across economic sectors, to capture the impact of neglected skewness and excess kurtosis in the asset return process, on the shape of the credit loss distribution. We specify Skew-Normal and Skew-Student t...

This paper examines the relationship between ownership structures and IPO long-run performance of non-SOEs in China. Although non-SOEs underperform the market in general after IPO but the poor performance is mainly caused by the IPOs with ownership control wedge. Non-SOEs with one share one vote...

We show that firms located geographically close to one another share a similar probability of having staggered boards (or classified boards), an effect probably due to investor clientele, local competition, and social interactions. We then exploit the variation across the zip codes in the...

This paper examines the optimal capital structure of a firm that delegates its financing decision of a risky project to a manager who is both risk averse and regret averse. Regret aversion is characterized by a utility function that includes disutility from having chosen ex-post suboptimal...

The study of tail events has become a central preoccupation for academics, investors and policy makers, given the recent financial turmoil. However, the question on what differentiates a crash from a tail event remains unsolved. This article elaborates a new definition of stock market crash...