This paper is motivated by high levels of non-performing loans in the Zimbabwean banking sector since dollarization in 2009. Banks are well known for their function of providing liquidity in the economy. Normal loan awarding require credit analysis. Credit analysis is undertaken to assess the...

Exploiting position-level heterogeneity in regulatory incentives to misreport and novel data on regulators, we document that U.S. life insurers inflate the values of corporate bonds using internal models. We estimate an additional $9-$18 billion decline in regulatory capital during the 2008...

This study examines bank risk by investigating the equity and loan portfolio characteristics of publicly-traded bank holding companies. Unlike the pattern for non-financial firms, equity betas of large banks are two to five times greater than those of small banks. In explaining this, we note...

In a developing stock market such as China, where do informed traders locatelsquo; Does information originate with traders able to access companies, officials and insiders or are foreigners better informedlsquo; We examine the price discovery process for Chinese stocks simultaneously traded in...

We extend our prior work on how both supply (including the emergence of OTC equity derivatives and growth in share lending) and demand (including the growth of hedge funds) factors now facilitate the large-scale, low-cost decoupling of shareholder voting rights from shareholder economic...

Nontradable shares (NTS) are an unparalleled feature of the ownership structure of Chinese listed companies and represented a major hurdle to domestic financial market development. After some failed attempts, in 2005 the Chinese authorities have launched a structural reform program aiming at...

Ascertaining which enforcement mechanisms work to protect investors has been both a focus of recent work in academic finance and an issue for policy-making at international development agencies. According to recent academic work, private enforcement of investor protection via both disclosure and...

Most U.S. public companies have a single class of voting common shares: voting power is proportional to economic ownership. Linking votes to shares is often thought to be desirable, because, as residual claimants, shareholders have an incentive to exercise voting power well. The linkage also...

Income trust units are some of the highest selling products in the Canadian securities industry, but they have been less successful beyond Canadian borders. The author discusses the remarkable profitability and proliferation of income trusts in Canada, but maintains that arguments in favour of...