Explore the vast range of titles available.

To study the presence of a risk-taking channel in the U.S., we build a comprehensive data set from the syndicated corporate loan market and measure monetary policy using different measures, most notably Taylor (1993) and Romer and Romer (2004) residuals. We identify a negative relation between monetary policy rates and bank risk-taking, especially in the run up to the 2007 financial crisis. However, this effect is purely supply-side driven only when using Taylor residuals and an ex ante measure of bank risk-taking. Our results highlight the sensitivity of the potency of the risk-taking channel to the measures of monetary policy innovations.

We link genetic diversity in the country of origin of the firms’ board members with corporate performance via board members’ nationality. We hypothesize that our approach captures deep-rooted differences in cultural, institutional, social, psychological, physiological, and other traits that cannot be captured by other recently measured indices of diversity. Using a panel of firms listed in the North American and UK stock markets, we find that adding board directors from countries with different levels of genetic diversity (either higher or lower) increases firm performance. This effect prevails when we control for a number of cultural, institutional, firm-level, and board member characteristics, as well as for the nationality of the board of directors. To identify the relationship, we use—as instrumental variables for our diversity indices—the migratory distance from East Africa and the level of ultraviolet exposure in the directors’ country of nationality. This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance .

Employing a unique data set for the period 2000–2010, this paper examines the impact of formal enforcement actions targeting the core of the banks’ financial safety and soundness in terms of bank capital, risk, and performance. We find that, on average, these actions reduce both the risk-weighted assets and the nonperforming loans ratios of punished banks, but there is no increase in the level of regulatory capital. These effects are less powerful during the postcrisis period, suggesting that banks’ scope to improve their safety and soundness condition in crisis periods is much more limited. We also find, albeit with some limitations, that the timing of formal enforcement actions is important: the more the actions are deferred relative to the continuous deterioration of the banks’ financial condition, the more limited their impact on the risk-based capital ratio, while actions taken earlier help banks to improve their financial soundness. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2343 . This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance .

Small and micro-enterprises are usually majority-owned by entrepreneurs. Using a unique sample of loan applications from such firms, we study the role of owners’ gender in bank credit decisions and post-credit-decision firm outcomes. We find that, ceteris paribus, female entrepreneurs are more prudent loan applicants than are males because they are less likely to apply for credit or to default after loan origination. The relatively more aggressive behavior of male applicants pays off, however, in terms of higher average firm performance after loan origination.

We introduce country-month indices of efficiency of government policy in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our indices cover 81 countries and the period from May 2020 to November 2021. Our framework assumes that governments impose stringent policies (listed in the Oxford COVID-19 Containment and Health Index) with the single goal of saving lives. We find that positive and significant correlates of our new indices are institutions, democratic principles, political stability, trust, high public spending in health, female participation in the workplace, and economic equality. Within the efficient jurisdictions, the most efficient ones are those with cultural characteristics of high patience.

The nexus between ownership and competition in the banking sector is a major concern to policymakers around the world but one that is rarely comprehensively examined. For 131 countries and 13 years we match bank ownership with over 50,000 bank-year estimates of individual bank market power. We find that ownership does not explain market power at the individual bank level. However, at the country level, foreign bank ownership has a positive and significant impact on market power mainly because foreign banks enter through mergers or acquisitions and not through greenfield investments. The observed increases in market power primarily originate from decreases in the marginal cost.

Using MSA-level data over 1994–2014, we study the effect of bank failures on local business dynamics, in the form of net business formation and net job creation. We find that at least one bank failure in the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) with the mean population prevents approximately 475 net businesses from forming in that area, compared with MSAs that experience no bank failures, ceteris paribus. The equivalent effect on net job creation is 16,433 net job losses. Our results are even stronger for small businesses, which are usually more dependent on bank-firm relationships. These effects point to significant welfare losses stemming from bank failures, highlighting an important role for government intervention. We show that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is effective in reducing the negative effects of bank failures on local business dynamics. This positive effect of TARP is quite uniform across small and large firms.

Purpose - This paper aims to analyze bank efficiency into a number of bank-specific, industry-specific and macroeconomic determinants.Design methodology approach - The authors follow a semi-parametric two-stage methodology, where productive efficiency is derived via a non-parametric technique in the first stage and then the scores obtained are linked to a series of determinants of bank efficiency, using a double bootstrapping procedure.Findings - Overall, it is found that the banking sectors of almost all the sample countries show a gradual improvement in their efficiency levels. The model used shows that a number of determinants like bank size, industry concentration and the investment environment have a positive impact on bank efficiency, which is not the case when standard Tobit models are employed.Research limitations implications - The findings have important implications for the relevance of well-known hypotheses that refer to the performance of the banking sectors, like the structure-conduct-performance and the efficient structure hypotheses. These implications are not necessarily verified when past conventional econometric methodologies are used.Practical implications - The paper offers new insights to policy makers, bank managers and practitioners on the relevance of a number of driving factors of bank efficiency that might help them to improve the performance of the banking system and enhance the quality of services provided.Originality value - This is the first paper in the bank efficiency literature that employs a semi-parametric two-stage model, which relaxes several deficiencies of previous two-stage empirical approaches thus, offering a solution to the many problematic features of standard censored regressions.

We empirically test the hypothesis that a major in economics, management, business administration or accounting (for simplicity referred to as Business/Economics) leads to more-conservative (right-wing) political views. We use a panel dataset of individuals (repeated observations for the same individuals over time) living in the Netherlands, drawing data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences from 2008 through 2013. Our results show that when using a simple fixed effects model, which fully controls for individuals' time-invariant traits, any statistically and quantitatively significant effect of a major in Business/Economics on the Political Ideology of these individuals disappears. We posit that, at least in our sample, there is no evidence for a causal effect of a major in Business/Economics on individuals' Political Ideology.

This paper examines the relationship between the regulatory and supervision framework, and the productivity of banks in 22 countries over the period 1999—2009. We follow a semiparametric two-step approach that combines Malmquist index estimates with bootstrap regressions. The results indicate that regulations and incentives that promote private monitoring (PMON) have a positive impact on productivity. Restrictions on banks' activities relating to their involvement in securities, insurance, real estate, and ownership of nonfinancial firms also have a positive impact. Regulations relating to the first and second pillars of Basel II, namely, capital requirements (CAPR) and official supervisory power (SPR) do not have, in general, a statistically significant impact on productivity over the study period although they appear to gain in importance following the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. The latter finding indicates that stringent capital and supervisory standards have positive productivity effects when financial pressures peak. Our results are robust when controlling for various country-specific features and alternative estimation approaches.