We estimate a dynamic model of the decision to close a troubled bank. Regulators trade off an aversion to closing banks against the risk that allowing a bank to continue will raise the eventual costs to the deposit insurance fund. Using a conditional choice probability approach, we estimate the costs associated with closing banks, both in direct costs to the insurance fund and in other costs perceived by regulators, either social or personal. We find that delayed closures were driven by a desire to defer costs, an aversion to closing the largest and smallest troubled banks, and political influence.

A large and rapidly growing literature examines the impact of misvaluation on firm policies by using mutual fund outflow‐induced price pressure to isolate nonfundamental price variation. I demonstrate that the standard approach to computing outflow‐induced price pressure produces a measure that is inadvertently a direct function of a stock's actual realized return during the outflow quarter, raising doubts about its orthogonality to fundamentals. After removing these direct measurements of return, outflows generate a fairly negligible quarterly decline in returns, with no subsequent reversal, and many established results in this literature no longer hold. I provide suggestions for future analysis.

This paper presents evidence of a large, persistent decline in establishment-level workplace injury rates after private equity (PE) buyouts of publicly traded U.S. firms. We find that firms experience fewer OSHA safety violations after buyouts and that a larger decline in injury rates is associated with an increased probability of exit via IPO. Employment reductions after buyouts are concentrated in relatively low-injury-risk establishments. Overall, our results suggest that buyouts improve workplace safety and that PE acquirers benefit from this improvement. We explore possible causes of these changes through interviews with executives of companies acquired in buyouts and through cross-sectional analysis.

We estimate a dynamic model of the decision to close a troubled bank. Regulators trade off an aversion to closing banks against the risk that allowing a bank to continue will raise the eventual costs to the deposit insurance fund. Using a conditional choice probability approach, we estimate the costs associated with closing banks, both in direct costs to the insurance fund and in other costs perceived by regulators, either social or personal. We find that delayed closures were driven by a desire to defer costs, an aversion to closing the largest and smallest troubled banks, and political influence.

We present evidence that financing frictions adversely impact investment in workplace safety, with implications for worker welfare and firm value. Using several identification strategies, we find that injury rates increase with leverage and negative cash flow shocks, and decrease with positive cash flow shocks. We show that firm value decreases substantially with injury rates. Our findings suggest that investment in worker safety is an economically important margin on which firms respond to financing constraints.

We study depositor behavior and capital flight using data from the Freedman’s Savings Bank, a bank established after the U.S. Civil War to support formerly enslaved individuals. White depositors, who generally had better access to financial information, begin providing significant funding as interest terms are enhanced. They respond faster to postpanic stabilization efforts and negative bank-specific information, and are twice as likely to close accounts before failure, passing expected losses to Black depositors, who were the bank’s primary philanthropic target. Our results show how demand deposit funding of bank-like institutions can create systemic disadvantages for less experienced borrowers.

Using detailed depositor arrival data from the Freedman’s Savings and Trust, we examine how the failure to prevent racial violence impacts bank participation. From 1866 to 1873, we find that events of racial violence perpetrated against Black Americans decrease new account openings at branches in the same region by 25% relative to other branches in the 30 days after the event. Alternatively, events that increased political representation and protections increase the relative arrival of new depositors at the bank by around 50% for the affected branches. We also show that those who opened accounts in the wake of a violent event were less likely to close an account before the bank’s eventual failure, suggesting that those who were resistant to the impact of political violence may have tragically been more exposed to other institutional failures.

This paper assesses different econometric approaches to working with count-based outcome variables and other outcomes with similar distributions, which are increasingly common in corporate finance applications. We demonstrate that the common practice of estimating linear regressions of the log of 1 plus the outcome produces estimates with no natural interpretation that can have the wrong sign in expectation. In contrast, a simple fixed-effects Poisson model produces consistent and reasonably efficient estimates under more general conditions than commonly assumed. We also show through replication of existing papers that economic conclusions can be highly sensitive to the regression model employed.