We provide new evidence on the role of bank lending in corporate innovation by exploiting the implementation of SFAS 166/167, which removed the off--balance sheet status of certain securitized assets of banks. The regulation affects bank lending and thus represents a credit supply shock to...

We provide new evidence that firms appear to manage long-run earnings upward in order to manage rank and file employees' perceptions of employment security. In particular, we exploit exogenous state-level changes in unemployment insurance benefits and test for partial unwinding of prior upward...

Evidence suggests that managers have an incentive to keep information opaque with the market when negotiating with employees who can extract above-market rents from the firm. We argue that employee ownership should mitigate this incentive to extract above-market rents and, in turn, alleviate the...

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has accepted complaints about banks' financial products and services since 2011 and has released the complaint database to the public since 2013. We analyze the effectiveness of this public disclosure in protecting mortgage borrowers. We find a...

We examine the real effects of FAS 166 and FAS 167 on banks' loan‐level mortgage approval and sale decisions. Effective in 2010, these standards tightened the accounting for securitizations and consolidation of securitization entities, respectively, causing banks to recognize an estimated $811...

The Community Reinvestment Act requires banks to disclose the geographic distribution of their small business lending, which informs the public about their performance in meeting the credit needs of local communities. We investigate whether such disclosures increase public pressure and thus have...

We use machine learning methods and high-dimensional detailed financial data to predict the direction of one-year-ahead earnings changes. Our models show significant out-of-sample predictive power: the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve ranges from 67.52% to 68.66%,...

In 2013, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a database of consumer complaints filed against banks under its supervision (“CFPB banks”). We find that after the disclosure, rival banks exhibit a greater increase in mortgage approval rates in markets with more intensive...

The CARD Act restricts consumer credit card issuers’ ability to raise interest rates. We examine whether the Act influences the degree to which an issuer adjusts offered interest rates in response to changes in interest rates offered by other lenders—the price responsiveness. Using small...

We investigate whether the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 influenced the debt structure of consumers. By debt structure, we mean the proportion of total available credit from credit cards for each consumer.The act enhances disclosures of contractual...