An important question is whether the financial safety net reduces market discipline on bank risk taking. For countries with varying deposit insurance schemes, we find that deposit rates continue to reflect bank riskiness. Cross-country evidence suggests that explicit deposit insurance reduces...

High domestic shareholder concentration for publicly-traded firms is a common mechanism to mitigate minority shareholder expropriation in environments of poor investor protection. This offers an explanation of the home bias in share portfolios. An alternative mechanism, common in the case of...

This paper shows that banks use accounting discretion to overstate the value of distressed assets. Banks' balance sheets overvalue real estate-related assets compared to the market value of these assets, especially during the U.S. mortgage crisis. Share prices of banks with large exposure to...

This paper presents a model of a multinational firm''s optimal debt policy that incorporates international taxation factors. The model yields the prediction that a multinational firm''s indebtedness in a country depends on a weighted average of national tax rates and differences between national...

This paper shows that banks use accounting discretion to overstate the value of distressed assets. Banks'' balance sheets overvalue real estate-related assets compared to the market value of these assets, especially during the U.S. mortgage crisis. Share prices of banks with large exposure to...

This paper examines the impact of thin capitalization rules that limit the tax deductibility of interest on the capital structure of the foreign affiliates of US multinationals. We construct a new data set on thin capitalization rules in 54 countries for the period 1982-2004. Using confidential...