This paper examines whether stock market listing influences the persistence of bank performance across crises. We find that for both publicly and privately held banks, bank performance during the 1998 crisis is a strong predictor of bank performance during the 2007–2008 crisis. While for publicly held banks, the persistence is uniquely driven by bottom performers, for privately held banks the persistence is also driven by a group of top performers. We further show that banks that make a private-to-public transition between the two crises underperform in the 2007–08 crisis, especially if they are top performers during the 1998 crisis and more concerned about short-term stock price. We also document that after making a private-to-public transition, banks increase risk in a way that makes them more vulnerable to crises.

We explore the effects of online customer ratings on financial policy. Using a large sample of Parisian restaurants, we find a positive and economically significant relationship between customer ratings and restaurant debt. We use the locally exogenous variations in customer ratings resulting from the rounding of scores in regression discontinuity tests to establish causality. Favorable online ratings reduce cash flow risk and increase resilience to demand shocks. Consistent with the view that good online ratings increase the debt capacity of restaurants and their growth opportunities, restaurants with good ratings use their extra debt to invest in tangible assets.