The composition of risks assumed by U. S. commercial banks underwent a dramatic transformation over the years leading up to the financial crisis: between 2000 and 2006 idiosyncratic risk dropped by almost half while systematic risk doubled. These patterns, more pronounced in banks with heavy...

We find weak governance is a primary reason investors react negatively to the announcement of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find investors worry about non-productive use of SEO proceeds when external pressure for good governance lifts due to an...

We provide causal evidence that adverse capital shocks to banks affect their borrowers' performance negatively. We use an exogenous shock to the U.S. banking system during the Russian crisis of Fall 1998 to separate the effect of borrowers' demand of credit from the supply of credit by the...

An originate-to-distribute (OTD) model of lending, where the originator of a loan sells it to various third parties, was a popular method of mortgage lending before the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis. We show that banks with high involvement in the OTD market during the pre-crisis period...

We find a positive cross-sectional relationship between expected stock returns and default risk, contrary to the negative relationship estimated by prior studies. Whereas prior studies use noisy ex post realized returns to estimate expected returns, we use ex ante estimates based on the implied...

Using a large sample of bank loans issued to U.S. firms between 1990 and 2004, we find that lower takeover defenses (as proxied by the lower G-index of Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick 2003) significantly increase the cost of loans for a firm. Firms with lowest takeover defense (democracy) pay a 25%...