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Small and micro-enterprises are usually majority-owned by entrepreneurs. Using a unique sample of loan applications from such firms, we study the role of owners’ gender in bank credit decisions and post-credit-decision firm outcomes. We find that, ceteris paribus, female entrepreneurs are more prudent loan applicants than are males because they are less likely to apply for credit or to default after loan origination. The relatively more aggressive behavior of male applicants pays off, however, in terms of higher average firm performance after loan origination.

The rising environmental awareness induces a changing landscape for policymakers and real economic prospects. We examine the properties of a general equilibrium model with endogenous household preferences (for labor, consumption, and environmental quality) and a negative environmental externality. The endogeneity of labor creates an additional channel of substitution between environmental quality and labor, besides the channel of substitution between environmental quality and consumption. We show that a key requirement for improved output following a positive shock in the weight of environmental quality (household environmental awareness) is that environmental awareness trades off the weight on labor and not the weight on consumption. An interesting feature of the model is that the existence of the environmental externality gives a non-zero capital tax in the long run.

Using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier models, we introduce a new country-month index of efficiency of government policy in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our indices are in respect of 81 countries and cover the period from May 2020 to March 2021. Our framework assumes that governments impose stringent policies with the ultimate goal of saving lives. We use policies listed in the Oxford COVID-19 Containment and Health Index as government policy input, and a deaths-based measure as the output. Importantly, we estimate our output to account for country-month variations in the quality of reporting deaths. Based on their average efficiency, the top five countries are Taiwan, Japan, Estonia, Finland, and New Zealand. We also examine the correlates of our new indices and find that the important and positive ones are institutions, democratic principles, political stability, high public spending in health, female participation in the workplace, and economic equality. Within the efficient jurisdictions, the most efficient ones are those with cultural characteristics of low power distance and high patience. The new index and its correlates produce several avenues for future research.

We contend that economic preferences over risk-taking in different subnational regions worldwide affect fundamental aspects of firms’ corporate financing, namely financing costs and capital structure. We study this hypothesis, by hand-matching firms’ regions worldwide with the corresponding regional economic risk-taking preferences. Our baseline results show that credit and bond pricing increase with higher risk-taking preferences, whereas such preferences yield lower ratios of book leverage and short-term debt. We backup our baseline results with an instrumental variables approach, which is based on the premise that high-yield agricultural societies in the pre-industrial era exhibit low risk-taking preferences.

Using the full sample of U.S. banks and hand-collected data on enforcement actions over 2000–2014, we analyze the role of these interventions in promoting several aspects of accounting quality. We find that enforcement actions issued for both risk-related and accounting-related reasons lead to significant improvements in accounting quality. This improvement is consistently found for earnings smoothing, big-bath accounting, timely recognition of future loan losses, the association of loan loss provisions with future loan charge offs, loss avoidance, and cash flow predictability and earnings persistence. Most of the effects are somewhat more potent in the crisis period and survive in several sensitivity tests. Our findings highlight the imperative role of regulatory interventions in promoting bank accounting quality.

We contend that industry heterogeneity in risk and financing has important implications for the passthrough of monetary policy to corporate loan spreads. Existing literature on the risk-taking channel shows that lax monetary policy induces bank risk-taking, and this implies that industries’ risk profiles might induce asymmetries in monetary policy passthrough. Using U.S. syndicated loans over 1984-2018, we examine industry heterogeneity in the potency of the risk-taking channel and assess how this heterogeneity affects firms’ performance. We find that a one percentage point decrease in the shadow rate increases loan cost by approximately 30 basis points in the mining-construction and manufacturing sectors. The effect is lower in the services and transportation-utilities industries, while it is insignificant in the trade and finance sectors. The identified differences in the potency of the risk-taking channel explain a significant part of the inferior firm performance of highly affected sectors in the year after loan origination.

We study whether management practices determine merger and acquisition (M&A) success. We model management as an unobserved (latent) variable in a standard microeconomic model of the firm and derive firm-year management estimates. We validate these estimates against benchmark survey data on management practices and by using Monte Carlo simulation. We show that our measure is among the most important determinants of value creation in M&A deals, substantially increasing the predictive power of models that explain cumulative abnormal returns. Thus, we offer a measure of management practices that identifies the best-performing M&As. Our results are robust to the inclusion of acquirer fixed effects and many control variables, and to several other sensitivity tests. We identify the Q-theory as the key mechanism driving our results.

Using data for 6740 U.S. banks from 1996 to 2016, we consider whether mortgage loan demand is a key determinant of banks’ cost efficiency and management quality. We estimate mortgage loan demand from loan-level applications at individual banks, and we estimate bank efficiency and management quality score from banks’ structural models. In line with theoretical considerations around economies of scale, our results show that loan amount demand improves cost efficiency, but the number of loan applications reduces cost efficiency. In contrast, mortgage loan demand has an economically less significant effect on management quality score. We also find that loan demand is an important factor in shaping banks’ loan quality, above and beyond operational efficiency.

Small and micro enterprises are usually majority owned by entrepreneurs. Using a unique sample of loan applications from such firms, we study the role of owners’ gender in the credit decision of banks and the post-credit decision firm outcomes. We find that, ceteris paribus, female entrepreneurs are more prudent loan applicants, with both the probabilities to apply for credit and of firm default after the loan origination being smaller. However, the relatively more aggressive behavior of male applicants pays off in terms of higher average firm performance after the loan origination.

This paper exploits a unique data set on bank-firm relationships based on syndicated loan deals to examine the effect of banks’ credit risk and capital on firms’ risk and performance. Our data set is a multilevel cross-section, which essentially allows controlling for all bank and firm characteristics through respective fixed effects, thus avoiding concerns regarding omitted variables. We find that banks with higher credit risk are associated with more risky firms, with lower profitability and market value. In turn, we find that banks with higher risk-weighted capital ratios lend to riskier firms with less market value. Our results are indicative of a strong adverse selection mechanism and highlight the need to monitor the risky banks more closely, especially as we consider large and influential syndicated loan deals.

We present and estimate a model of management practices as technology of the banking firm. Management is an unobserved (latent) input in the production function of banks, which we estimate at the bank-quarter level using data for all U.S. banks from 1984 to 2016 and Bayesian techniques. We show that management practices are, next to deposits funding, the most important input in the banks’ production process, explaining an important part of bank performance and risk. We validate our approach using repeated random sampling (Monte Carlo simulation) within a rather unfavorable environment. Our model can be considered as benchmark to robustly estimate good management practices, to analyze their sources, and to establish good management as an important determinant of efficient and sound banking.

We empirically test the hypothesis that a major in economics, management, business administration or accounting (for simplicity referred to as Business/Economics) leads to more-conservative (right-wing) political views. We use a panel dataset of individuals (repeated observations for the same individuals over time) living in the Netherlands, drawing data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences from 2008 through 2013. Our results show that when using a simple fixed effects model, which fully controls for individuals’ time-invariant traits, any statistically and quantitatively significant effect of a major in Business/Economics on the Political Ideology of these individuals disappears. We posit that, at least in our sample, there is no evidence for a causal effect of a major in Business/Economics on individuals’ Political Ideology.

Measuring management practices robustly is difficult, which leaves an important element missing in identifying M&A success. This paper studies management practices as an unobserved (latent) variable using a standard microeconomic model. We show that our measure is the most important determinant of value creation in M&A deals: a one-standard-deviation increase in the measure almost doubles cumulative abnormal returns. Our results are robust to the inclusion of acquirer fixed effects, to a large set of control variables, and to several other sensitivity tests. We posit that any future study of M&A success should include a management component.

We develop a framework to incorporate bank risk, as measured from the variance of profits or returns, within a model of frontier efficiency. Our framework follows the premise that risk is endogenously related to efficiency. We estimate our model using panel data for U.S. banks and Bayesian techniques. We show that excluding risk from the efficiency model significantly biases the efficiency estimates and the ranking of banks according to their competitive advantage. We also demonstrate that there is a negative risk-efficiency nexus with causality running both ways, while our estimates of risk are fully consistent with the developments in the banking industry over the period 1976–2014.

What is the effect of environmental awareness on the households’ consumption of polluting goods and labor supply decisions? We answer this question using household survey data from the United States and measuring environmental awareness with the decision to make environmental donations. We find that environmental awareness has a negative and economically significant effect on labor supply. The respective impact on the consumption of polluting goods is also negative, but less robust in terms of statistical significance. Our results highlight the importance of understanding the foundations of household behavior related to environmental quality. Indeed, environmentally aware households are willing to tradeoff work hours with improved environmental quality and less so to change their consumption habits.

Using a panel data set of effective tax rates that are directly comparable across Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and over time, we investigate the redistributive effect of labour, consumption and capital tax rates. We show that what matters from a redistributive standpoint is the tax mix rather than the tax rates in isolation from the rest. The results suggest that increasing the tax burden on labour or consumption relative to capital leads to higher income inequality. In contrast, greater reliance on labour taxes relative to consumption taxes improves income equality. This effect likely stems from the redistributive objectives of social security contributions incorporated in labour taxes.

A decrease in the reputation of a loan syndicate’s lead arranger, caused by a regulatory enforcement action for non-compliance with laws and regulations, disincentivizes potential syndicate participants from co-financing the loan. We formally argue that in such cases, the lead arranger must increase his share of the loan in order to make the loan sufficiently attractive to potential participants. We provide strong empirical evidence to support our theoretical argument, using the full sample of enforcement actions enacted on U.S. banks from 2000 through 2010 as well as syndicated loan-level data.

We study whether management practices determine merger and acquisition (M&A) success. We model management as an unobserved (latent) variable in a standard microeconomic model of the firm and derive firm-year management estimates. We validate these estimates against benchmark survey data on management practices and by using Monte Carlo simulation. We show that our measure is among the most important determinants of value creation in M&A deals, substantially increasing the predictive power of models that explain cumulative abnormal returns. Thus, we offer a measure of management practices that identifies the best-performing M&As. Our results are robust to the inclusion of acquirer fixed effects and many control variables, and to several other sensitivity tests. We identify the Q-theory as the key mechanism driving our results.