Of key importance in the governance structure of firms is the role of financial incentives for each major player. The main contribution of this article is an analysis of how an insider's concentration of wealth in his or her bank investment affects incentives to take risk. Major empirical findings are that, first, bank earnings variation falls when bank managers have more of their wealth concentrated in their banks; second, hired-manager banks become less risky when a person who has significant motivation to monitor bank management has his or her wealth highly concentrated in the bank; and third, stock ownership by hired managers can increase total risk of a bank. Further analysis suggests that community banks in our sample control earnings variation by manipulating idiosyncratic risk, credit risk, and leverage but not systematic risk or the loan-to-asset ratio.

This is the first study to examine both how well plan administrators select funds for 401(k) plans and how participants react to plan administrator decisions. We find that, on average, administrators select funds that outperform randomly selected funds of the same type although they do not outperform index funds of the same type. When administrators change offerings, they choose funds that did well in the past, but, after the change, added funds do no better than dropped funds. Plan participants in aggregate change their allocation decisions in a way that accentuates the changes in allocation caused by returns. The change in allocation due to the investment of new money and interfund transfers is about the same size, and in the same direction, as the change due to returns. Participant allocations in aggregate do no better than naïve allocation rules, such as equal investment in each offering.

We investigate the link between a firm's leverage and the characteristics of its suppliers and customers. Specifically, we examine whether firms use decreased leverage as a commitment mechanism to induce suppliers/customers to undertake relationship-specific investments. We find that the firm's leverage is negatively related to the R&D intensities of its suppliers and customers. We also find lower debt levels for firms operating in industries in which strategic alliances and joint ventures with firms in supplier and customer industries are more prevalent. Consistent with a bargaining role for debt, we find a positive relation between firm debt level and the degree of concentration in supplier/customer industries.

This paper argues that a risk-averse worker's after-tax reservation wage encodes all the relevant information about her welfare. This insight leads to a novel test for the optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wages to unemployment benefits. Some existing estimates imply significant gains to raising the current level of unemployment benefits in the United States but highlight the need for more research on the determinants of reservation wages. Our approach complements those based on Baily's [Journal of Public Economics, X (1978), 379–402] test.

We use internal control deficiency (ICD) disclosures prior to mandated internal control audits to investigate economic factors that expose firms to control failures and managements’ incentives to discover and report control problems. We find that, relative to non-disclosers, firms disclosing ICDs have more complex operations, recent organizational changes, greater accounting risk, more auditor resignations and have fewer resources available for internal control. Regarding incentives to discover and report internal control problems, ICD firms have more prior SEC enforcement actions and financial restatements, are more likely to use a dominant audit firm, and have more concentrated institutional ownership.

We examine 12-month returns following disclosure of first-time going concern (GC) opinions in the U.S. and Australia. We find no evidence of significant negative abnormal returns associated with GC opinions in Australia. In the U.S., negative abnormal returns subsequent to GC opinions are sensitive to choice of expected returns—notably, there are no significant negative abnormal returns when using factor models or after controlling for momentum. Overall, contrary to Taffler, Lu, Kausar's [2004. In denial? Stock market underreaction to going-concern audit report disclosures. Journal of Accounting and Economics 38, 263–285.] U.K. results, we are unable to document a market anomaly in the U.S. or Australia associated with GC opinions.

Standard asset pricing models assume that: (i) there is complete agreement among investors about probability distributions of future payoffs on assets; and (ii) investors choose asset holdings based solely on anticipated payoffs; that is, investment assets are not also consumption goods. Both assumptions are unrealistic. We provide a simple framework for studying how disagreement and tastes for assets as consumption goods can affect asset prices.

Foreign entry and bank competition are modeled as the interaction between asymmetrically informed principals: The entrant uses collateral as a screening device to contest the incumbent's informational advantage. Both better information ex ante and stronger legal protection ex post are shown to facilitate the entry of low-cost outside competitors into credit markets. The entrant's success in gaining borrowers of higher quality by offering cheaper loans increases with its efficiency (cost) advantage. This paper accounts for evidence suggesting that foreign banks tend to lend more to large firms thereby neglecting small and medium enterprises. The results also explain why this observed bias is stronger in emerging markets.