Using a large sample of accounting data for non-financial companies in France, this paper studies the interactions between macroeconomic shocks and companies’ financial fragility. We consider links in both directions, namely whether firms’ bankruptcies are affected by macroeconomic variables, and whether bankruptcies determine the business cycle. We estimate forecasting equations for firms’ bankruptcy using Shumway's (2001) approach and study the joint dynamics of bankruptcies and macroeconomic variables within an exogenous VAR type model estimated at the sector level. We find evidence of reciprocal links between the bankruptcy rate and the output gap and highlight significant “second round effects” of shocks to the output gap on bankruptcies. We show how taking into account the dynamic transmission of macroeconomic shocks matters in stress testing exercises.

We employ a new data set comprised of disaggregate figures on clearing house loan certificate issues in New York City to document how the dominant national banks were crucial providers of temporary liquidity during the Panic of 1907. Clearing house loan certificates were extensions of credit by the New York Clearing House to its members. These certificates were transferable to other clearing house members as a form of final payment for settlement of interbank payments. The certificate issues allowed borrowing banks to maintain (and increase) loans, fulfill cash payment upon depositor withdrawal demands, and enabled gold imports, which took two to three weeks to arrive. The large, New York City national banks acted as private liquidity providers by requesting (and the New York Clearing House issuing) a volume of clearing house loan certificates in excess of their own immediate liquidity needs, in accord with their role as central reserve city banks in the national banking system.

The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of twenty-one books on the crisis, eleven written by academics, and ten written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and often contradictory collection of interpretations, but the sheer variety of conclusions is informative, and underscores the desperate need for the economics profession to establish a single set of facts from which more accurate inferences and narratives can be constructed.

Using a sample of restatement firms and a meet-or-beat model to classify firms as making discretionary accounting choices for opportunistic meet-or-beat (OP-MB) reasons, we show that originally reported earnings and accrual components are less predictive of future cash flows relative to the restated numbers. We find the opposite is true for firms classified as making discretionary accounting choices for non-OP-MB reasons. We consider a number of competing explanations for these latter results. Our findings are most consistent with the informational hypothesis, weakly consistent with conservative-motivated efficient contracting hypotheses, but inconsistent with opportunistic contracting and misapplication/errors of GAAP explanations.

We examine the benefits and costs associated with foreign independent directors (FIDs) at U.S. corporations. We find that firms with FIDs make better cross-border acquisitions when the targets are from the home regions of FIDs. However, FIDs also display poor board meeting attendance records and are associated with a greater likelihood of intentional financial misreporting, higher CEO compensation, and a lower sensitivity of CEO turnover to performance. Finally, firms with FIDs exhibit significantly poorer performance, especially as their business presence in the FID's home region becomes less important.

We examine a vertical integration decision within the commercial banking industry. During the last quarter of the 20th century, some community banks reduced their traditional reliance on correspondent banks for upstream products and services by joining bankers' banks, a form of business cooperative. Research on vertical integration focuses primarily on firm-specific investment, market power, and government regulation. However, this case is difficult to explain in terms of these standard vertical integration motives. Our evidence suggests that bankers' banks are a response to technological change and deregulation that results in increased costs faced by community banks in dealing with correspondent banks as both suppliers and potential competitors. For instance, loan participations require sharing proprietary information about major loan customers, something a community bank would not want to provide to a potential competitor.

The classic model of Becker (1965, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time”, Economic Journal, 125, 493–517) suggests that labour supply decisions should be analysed within the broader context of time allocation and market good consumption choices, but most empirical work on policy has focused exclusively on measuring impacts on market work. This paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation during the entire day and how these time allocation decisions interact with expenditure patterns. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1975 to 2004, we analyse the response of single women's housework, labour supply, and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels, number of children, states, and time. We find that when the economic reward to participating in the labour force increases, market work increases and housework decreases, with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two-thirds of the increase in market work. Analysis of repeated cross sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that “home production” decreases substantially when market hours of work increase in response to policy changes. Data on expenditures show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labour force. The baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2·61. The results are consistent with the Becker model. Meanwhile, single men show little response to changes in tax policy, and we are able to rule out an elasticity of substitution between home and market goods for this group of more than 1·66.

We study the effects that the ban on short sales of shares in financial firms introduced in late 2008 and removed early 2009 had on the microstructure and the quality of UK equity markets. We show that the ban did nothing to affect order flows: financial stocks were being more aggressively sold off than their peers pre-ban and this situation persisted through the ban period. Trading volume in financials was massively reduced, however. The ban decimated order book liquidity for financials. The deterioration was symmetric, affecting the limit buy and limit sell side of the order book equally. Finally we show that, through the period of the ban, markets for financial stocks were substantially less efficient and that the role of the trading process in aiding price discovery was greatly reduced. The effects identified above were largely reversed once the ban was lifted. The persistence of the deterioration in market quality and liquidity though the relatively long-lasting UK ban on short selling suggests that other major market developments such as the TARP program were not responsible since these were concentrated in the early half of the ban. We thus argue that the short selling ban was responsible for detrimental effects on the quality of UK equity markets and that, far from being stabilising, the ban exacerbated problems in valuing UK financial stocks.

We investigate the relationships between the severity of operational loss events reported in the banking sector and various regulatory, legal, geographical, and economic indicators. Based on a data sample of over 57,000 losses incurred in more than 130 countries reported by the Operational Riskdata eXchange (ORX) consortium, we identify the most relevant exposure indicators for losses in four Basel II event categories: Internal Fraud; External Fraud; Employment Practices and Workplace Safety; and Clients, Products and Business Practices. We find evidence of significant correlations between Internal Fraud and constraints on executive power and the prevalence of insider trading. Clients, Products and Business Practices losses are significantly related to securities and shareholder protection laws, restrictions on banking activity, supervisory power, and the prevalence of insider trading. Other event types are sensitive to per-capita GDP and a governance index.