The reaction of German energy policy to the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe was swift and radical. The conservative-business liberal coalition in power committed to a spectacular political u-turn as it enacted an extension of the operation periods of German nuclear power plants just one year before...

An ambitious shift in energy policy, such as that of the German government and which other countries are aiming to emulate, poses great challenges. One Herculean task is integrating those renewable sources of electricity generation which are experiencing dynamic growth but are also subject to...

How do changes in banking regulation affect the syndicated loan market? Because branch networks and loan syndication both facilitate banks' ability to diversify geographical credit risk, we focus on the Riegle-Neal Interstate Branching and Banking Efficiency Act of 1994. We investigate its...

Banks are closing branches at an unprecedented rate. In various countries up to four out of five branches have been closed, while in the US over 11,000 branches representing eleven percent o its peak stock in 2009 have been closed so far. To differentiate between various explanations for this...

This paper explains an empirical paradox which is often found, but generally ignored: a significant negative econometric relationship between profitability and market share concentration. The phenomenon can appear when there is a negative correlation between market share and costs - for example...

Using Compustat to measure industry concentration in the U.S. is problematic. Popular approximations of the Herfindahl Index based on this data set have a vanishingly low correlation with the more comprehensive Census measure. As a result, major variables of interest in corporate finance show...

Violations of financial covenants shift control rights to lenders. When borrowers have lending relationships with these lenders in control, they experience not only smaller declines in investment, but also lesser deteriorations in both firm survival prob- abilities and in sales. These effects...

“Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) is a key innovation in consumer finance in recent years. Using a randomized experiment at an e-commerce company, we document that – when BNPL is available – customers spend 20% more, with low-creditworthiness customers being most responsive to the introduction...

We provide a method to identify and classify payment firms and assess the effect of two innovations – cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – on the payment industry. We find that payment firms’ stock returns are uncorrelated with proxies for the rise and fall of...