Restrictions on stock ownership may harm a company's performance, because restrictions prevent owners from choosing an optimal structure. We examine the stock-price performance and ownership structure of a sample of thrift institutions that converted from mutual to stock ownership. We find that after conversion and the expiration of ownership-structure restrictions, firm performance improves significantly, and the portions of the firm owned by managers and the firm's employee stock ownership plan increase. Changes in performance are positively associated with changes in ownership by managers, but negatively associated with changes in ownership by employee stock ownership plans.

In this article, I examine the effect of pre-existing relationships between a firm and its potential lender on the potential lender's decision whether or not to extend credit to the firm. I find that a potential lender is more likely to extend credit to a firm with which it has a pre-existing relationship as a source of financial services, but that the length of this relationship is unimportant. These findings provide empirical support for theories of financial intermediation positing that banking relationships generate valuable private information about the financial prospects of the financial institution's customer. The results also provide evidence that potential lenders are less likely to extend credit to firms with multiple sources of financial services, in support of the theory that the private information a financial institution generates about a firm is less valuable when the firm deals with multiple sources of financial services.

We investigate contagion effects in the stock returns of life insurance companies at the time of announcements by First Executive and Travelers of significant problems in their investment portfolios. We first demonstrate that investments in junk bonds or commercial mortgages are important for the shareholder wealth effects of other life insurance companies. We then directly link the shareholder wealth effects to characteristics of firms' customers. Our evidence shows that effects on shareholder wealth are larger for companies with significant junk bond/commercial mortgage assets and readily mobile customers as represented by guaranteed investment contracts (GICs).

Using a large sample of U.S. small businesses and a new measure of optimism, we examine the role of entrepreneurial optimism in small business lending. We provide evidence that optimistic entrepreneurs are not rationed by lenders. Quite the opposite, our results suggest that they often have better credit accessibility and obtain lower cost of financing. Our results are robust to alternative measures of optimism and controls for private information between lenders and borrowers.

In the USA, state-level exemptions determine the amount of property that individuals can protect from creditor liquidation during the debt settlement process. We exploit within-metropolitan statistical area variation in personal bankruptcy exemptions created by state borders and a stacked regression approach to identify the spillover effects of these laws on business credit extended to small firms. Subsequent to exemption increases, we find a reduction of 1–2 percent in originations of business credit. The effect is strongest for the smallest firms, which are more financially constrained. We provide household-level evidence that both business debt and personal debt decline for borrowers whose home equity becomes covered by the exemption, suggesting an overall decrease in credit availability for small businesses. As a result, increases in exemptions lead to fewer small establishments and lower employment, especially in industries dependent on external finance, suggesting that negative real economic effects occur via a credit market channel.

In this study, we test the predictive power of several alternative measures of bank capital adequacy in identifying U.S. bank failures during the recent crisis period. We find that an unconventional ratio – the non-performing asset coverage ratio (NPACR) – significantly outperforms Basel-based ratios including the Tier 1 ratio, the Total Capital Ratio, and the Leverage ratio – throughout the crisis period. It also outperforms in predicting failures among “well-capitalized” banks (as defined by the current Prompt Corrective Action guidelines). Based on our results, we argue that NPACR outperforms other ratios in at least five aspects: (i) it aligns capital and credit risks – the two primary risks of bank failures – in one measure; (ii) it is easier to calculate than the Tier 1 and Total Capital ratios, as it requires calculation of no complex risk weights; (iii) it allows one to account for various time period and cross-country provisioning rules and regimes, including episodes of regulatory forbearance and cross-country differences; (iv) it removes the incentives of both banks and regulators to mask capital deficiencies by creating/requiring insufficient loan-loss reserves; and (v) it outperforms all other commonly used capital ratios in predicting bank failures. We believe that all the above features of proposed measure promise its effective use in the prompt corrective actions by bank regulators. We also expect that this single and informative measure of bank risk can be efficiently used in empirical banking studies. The results of this study also shed light on regulatory forbearance during the recent banking crisis.

We analyze the relation between different forms of debt financing at the firm's start-up and subsequent firm outcomes. We distinguish between business debt, obtained in the name of the firm, and personal debt, obtained in the name of the firm's owner and used to finance the start-up firm. Start-up firms with better performance prospects are more likely to use debt and, in particular, business debt. Compared to all-equity firms, firms using debt at the initial year of operations are significantly more likely to survive and achieve higher levels of revenue three years after the firm's start-up. However, results hold for business debt only. Debt obtained in the name of the firm is associated with longer survival time and higher revenues, while debt obtained in the name of the firm's owner has no effect on survival time and is associated with lower revenues.

This study examines how the introduction of deposit insurance affects depositors and banks, using the deposit-insurance scheme introduced into the Russian banking system as a natural experiment. The fundamental research question is whether the introduction of deposit insurance leads to a more effective banking system as evidenced by increased deposit-taking and decreased reliance upon State-owned banks as custodians of retail deposits. We find that banks entering the new deposit-insurance system increase both their level of retail deposits and their ratios of retail deposits to total assets relative to banks that do not enter the new deposit insurance system. These results hold up in a multivariate panel-data analysis that controls for bank- and time-random effects. The longer a bank has been entered into the deposit insurance system, the greater is its level of deposits and its ratio of deposits to assets. Moreover, this effect is stronger for regional banks and for smaller banks. We also find that implementation of the new deposit-insurance system has the effect of “leveling the playing field” between State-owned banks and privately owned banks. Finally, we find strong evidence of moral hazard following implementation of deposit insurance in the form of increased bank risk-taking. Financial risk and, to a lesser degree, operating risk increase following implementation.

We examine the effects on IPO uncertainty of an alternative going-public mechanism – the two-stage IPO, where a firm first gets quoted on the OTC market, and then upgrades to a national exchange where it first issues public equity. We find that a two-stage IPO firm experiences lower underpricing and return volatility than does a similar traditional IPO firm. Our study is the first to analyze the impact of U.S. pre-IPO disclosure and liquidity on levels of uncertainty and pricing at the IPO stage. We find that greater disclosure and liquidity during the first stage leads to greater reduction in IPO uncertainty. We control for the potentially endogenous nature of the two-stage IPOs by using a difference-in-difference analysis that utilizes two exogenous OTC market events.