This paper finds non-interest income to be positively correlated with total systemic risk for a large sample of U.S. banks. Decomposing total systemic risk into three components, we find that non-interest income has a positive relationship with a bank's tail risk, a positive relationship with a...

The use of panel data in corporate finance is ubiquitous to estimate the impact of managers' and/or shareholders' choices on firm value. We evaluate the properties of four existing and widely used estimators (pooled OLS, random-effects, first-difference, and fixed-effects), and find them to be...

Hedge fund activism has increased almost hyperbolically. Although some view this trend optimistically as a means for bridging the separation of ownership and control, we review the evidence and find it far more mixed. In particular, engagements by activist hedge funds appear to be producing a...

This paper examines if Minority small business borrowers have the same access to loans from financial institutions as similar White borrowers. Using matching methods, we find that African-American borrowers are rejected at a higher rate (17-33% higher) than similar risk White-owned firms. We...

The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 mandated a number of regulatory reforms including a requirement that large U.S. public companies provide their shareholders with the opportunity to cast a non-binding vote on executive compensation. The “say on pay” vote was designed to rein in excessive levels of...

We construct a set of household-level background risk variables to capture the covariance structure of three nonfinancial assets and two financial assets. These risks are in general statistically significant and economically important for a household's stock market participation and stock...

Recent corporate scandals have raised considerable concern among regulators and stock market participants about related party transactions (RPTs), prompting Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) to prohibit personal loans to executives and non-executive board members. In a representative sample of companies for...