We examine the effects of banking deregulation on bank board policies—specifically, whether deregulation affects the performance and risk exposure measures used in bank CEO turnover decisions. Using the staggered adoption of interstate branching as our setting, we find that bank CEO turnover is more (less) sensitive to stock (accounting) performance after deregulation. We also find that deregulation is associated with a higher sensitivity of bank CEO turnover to the idiosyncratic component of tail risk. Moreover, such changes in turnover policies primarily exist in large banks and federally chartered banks, which are best positioned to exploit growth opportunities, and in banks that expand branch operations after deregulation. Our results indicate an increased emphasis on stock performance and tail risk in turnover decisions when growth opportunities are greater in the deregulated environment. The findings provide evidence that the information used in board decisions varies with features of the competitive environment.

Both sell-side analysts and the media are information intermediaries in capital markets. This study investigates the association between sell-side analyst research and information in firm-specific news coverage. More frequent recent news coverage is associated with stronger market reactions to analysts' research revisions, and primarily explained by soft information in news coverage. The primary result is robust to using both an instrumental variable and a quasi-natural experimental setting to generate exogenous variation in media coverage, alleviating concerns about endogeneity. In addition, using textual analysis, we document that explicit media references in analyst research reports are significantly associated with more frequent analyst revisions and stronger market reactions to revisions. Our study provides empirical evidence of analysts' assimilation of information from the financial press and their role in the efficiency of capital markets.

Despite private access to managers, issuer-paid credit rating agencies (CRAs) are often criticized for failing to promptly reflect material negative private information in their ratings and being ineffective corporate watchdogs. We utilize a novel dataset of private SEC investigations to examine the timeliness and informativeness of CRAs’ rating adjustments in response to material negative private information. Our evidence suggests that CRAs adjust ratings downward within a quarter following the opening of an SEC investigation. Moreover, these adjustments are over three times larger for those investigations that ultimately yield an enforcement action than for those that do not, suggesting that CRAs quickly form sophisticated expectations about the materiality of the private information. Additionally, rating downgrades during the investigations are more informative to the stock market than other rating downgrades. Overall, our evidence suggests that CRAs reduce information asymmetry in the capital markets by timely incorporating material private information in their ratings. Data Availability: All data are available from the sources cited in the text.