In theory, banning short selling stabilizes stock prices but undermines pricing efficiency and has ambiguous impacts on market liquidity. Empirical studies find mixed and conflicting results. This paper leverages cross-country policy variation during the 2020 Covid crisis to assess differential...

Close bank relationships are thought to ameliorate firms' liquidity constraints--a phenomenon frequently measured by liquidity sensitivity of investment. Using a panel of German firms during the formative years of universal banking (1903-1913), this paper shows that, even controlling for...

Close bank relationships are thought to ameliorate firms' liquidity constraints--a phenomenon frequently measured by liquidity sensitivity of investment. Using a panel of German firms during the formative years of universal banking 1903-1913), this paper shows that, even controlling for...

Information asymmetries and conflicts of interest are theorized to inflate the cost of external finance, but formal bank relationships are thought to ameliorate such problems and may even lead to excessive leverage. Bank oversight is associated with slightly higher leverage but not with greater...

Underpricing of new issues relates negatively to underwriter reputation in studies covering the US during the early 1970s until 1997 but positively in one study of IPOs from 1992-4. This paper investigates whether IPO underpricing depends on the organization of the financial system, whether...

We provide new evidence on the efficiency of the Berlin Stock Exchange prior to World War I, when it ranked among the top few markets worldwide by market capitalization. Using a new set of monthly stock price data for a random sample of German companies between 1904 and 1910, we estimate a...

Lack of both theoretical cogency and empirical evidence casts doubt on the Gerschenkronian paradigm of banking and industrial development. Social, political, and regulatory environments may shape financial systems, and institutions may persist beyond their usefulness. Central features of...

The cross-section of average annual returns on German common stock in the period of 1881-1913 exhibits several of the patterns that have been observed in more recent U.S. data. Market beta is hardly important, and its explanatory power is swamped by size and the ratio of book value to market...