This paper provides novel evidence that stronger contract enforcement mitigates holdup in business investment decisions using stark, externally imposed variation in contract enforcement across Native American reservations. My tests focus on the golf course industry. A high degree of sunk costs and long investment horizons in this industry make it naturally subject to the classical holdup problem. I find that state courts, which provide stronger contract enforcement than do tribal courts, lead to at least 27% more golf courses, with greater effects in areas with greater natural amenities. These findings suggest that courts play an important role in facilitating the oft-discussed contractual solutions to the holdup problem. Received November 13, 2017; editorial decision May 31, 2018 by Editor: Uday Rajan.

Do stocks bear a crash risk premium? We examine the empirical performance of the tail index measure from Kelly and Jiang (2014). We find that the tail index explains the cross-section of the discount rate component of returns, but not the cash-flow component. Moreover, in the time series the tail index is uncorrelated with theoretically motivated measures of aggregate uncertainty and systemic risk. In contrast, the tail index Granger causes and is Granger caused by the level of the term structure, and the slope of the term structure Granger causes tail risk. Received June 22, 2016; editorial decision December 23, 2017 by Editor Raman Uppal.

We study the evolution of investment-banking relationships from 1933 to 2007. Relationship exclusivity and client concerns for the state of their banking relationships were strong through the first part of our sample period but then entered a period of sharp decline beginning around 1970. We interpret the bank-client relationship as an informal governance mechanism for curbing opportunistic behavior in a weak contracting environment and examine how technological change aggravated conflicts of interest within investment banks and between banks and their clients. This perspective sheds light on why trust between banks and their clients now appears to be in short supply.Received March 2, 2018; editorial decision June 11, 2018 by Editor Paolo Fulghieri.

We examine the robustness of empirical models and findings concerning CEO turnover. We show that the sensitivity of turnover to abnormal firm performance is an extremely robust result. In contrast, evidence indicating a relation between turnover and industry performance is both weak and fragile. We show that small changes in turnover modeling choices can affect inferences in a large way. Our evidence casts substantial doubt on the hypothesis that there is a large industry performance component to turnover decisions. We use our findings to offer some general prescriptions for checking robustness results in CEO turnover research. Received June 6, 2017; editorial decision July 10, 2017 by Editor Uday Rajan.

We study a structural model of individual bank defaults across the banking sector; banks are interconnected through their exposure to a common risk factor. The paper introduces a systemic risk measure based on the default frequency in the banking sector; this measure depends non-linearly on the factor's loadings, in contrast to previous systemic risk measures that depend linearly on loadings. We estimate loadings in the U.S. banking system over the course of the last 36 years; we find that they have considerably increased over time and identify four major regimes. Our measure shows that systemic risk became critical in the last of our four regimes, covering the most recent time period from 05/2007 to 09/2016. The empirical findings highlight that our measure complements existing systemic risk measures.

Bennett and Hatfield (2018) conduct a role-playing experiment that provides important evidence on how face-to-face communication enhances the professional skepticism of auditors' inquiries, relative to written (email) communication. However, their study captures only part of the richness of auditor-client communication, with findings that could possibly interact with the effects of computer-mediated communication on the propensity for auditors to undertake an inquiry (e.g., Bennett & Hatfield, 2013) or on how client personnel choose to respond (e.g., Saiewitz & Kida, 2018). Experiments of this nature are limited by the fact that participants play only one role, with the other role fixed by design. This commentary challenges future researchers to push the frontier beyond these settings by considering the potential for truly interactive studies that examine how auditor and client personnel respond to each other.