Corporate Risk Taking and Ownership Structure

This paper investigates the determinants of corporate risk taking. Shareholders with substantial equity ownership in a single company may advocate conservative investment policies due to greater exposure to firm risk. Using a large cross-country sample, I find a positive relationship between corporate risk taking and equity ownership of the largest shareholder. This result is entirely driven by investors holding the largest equity stakes in more than one company. Family shareholders avoid corporate risk taking as their ownership increases unlike mutual funds, banks, financial and industrial companies. Stronger legal protection of shareholder rights is associated with more risk taking, while stronger legal protection of creditor rights reduces risk taking.Financial markets; International topics

Bank Loans for Private and Public Firms in a Credit Crunch

Banks reliance on short-term funding has increased over time. While an effective source of financing in good times, the 2007 financial crisis has exposed the vulnerability of banks and ultimately firms to such a liability structure. The authors show that banks that relied most on wholesale funding were the ones to contract its lending the most during the crisis. Their results suggest that banks propagate liquidity shocks by reducing credit only to a certain type of borrower. Importantly, in the financial crisis banks passed the liquidity shock only to public firms. Furthermore, long-term relationships between firms and banks played an important role during the crisis. Public firms with weak banking relationships pre-crisis experienced a greater credit crunch than other public borrowers.Financial institutions

Female managers and their wages in Central Europe

This paper examines the gender gaps in employment and wages among top- and lower-level managerial employees in a recent sample of Czech firms. Unlike the existing analyses of managerial gender pay gaps, we acknowledge the adverse consequences of the low and uneven representation of women for the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and offer an alternative set of results based on a matching procedure. Only 7% of top-level Czech managers are women and their wages are about 20 percent lower even when compared only to their comparable male colleagues

What is behind native-immigrant social income gaps?

The recent EU expansion raised fears of potential migration motivated by welfare receipt. In this paper we use comparable data from five countries - Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Norway and the U.S. - to ask whether immigrants benefit more from social support than natives. Looking at the European countries, we distinguish between migrants within and from outside the EU and find that within - EU migrants are similar to natives both in terms of their characteristics and social support receipt. On the other hand, we confirm the existence of large social income gaps in favor of non - EU immigrants, but these gaps are mainly due to the fact that immigrants' families have more children, fewer earners and are more likely to have no wage income. Household characteristics play a key role in 'explaining' the gap in Scandinavian countries, while individual characteristics are equally important in Belgium. In contrast to the European situation, U.S. immigrants receive less social income than natives and this is attributable mainly to their different individual characteristics

Corporate governance, product market competition and debt financing

This paper examines the impact of product market competition and corporate governance on the cost of debt financing and the use of bond covenants. We find that more antitakeover provisions are associated with a lower cost of debt only in competitive industries. Because they are exposed to higher takeover risk in competitive industries, bondholders charge higher bond spreads to firms that have fewer anti-takeover provisions. Once firms' anti-takeover provisions are in place, we find that bondholders use fewer payment and debt priority covenants in competitive industries. Our results suggest that product market competition plays a crucial role in explaining the way a firm's anti-takeover protection affects the cost of debt and the use of bond covenants

Rollover risk and the maturity transformation function of banks

This paper shows that banks that rely heavily on short-term funding engage less in maturity transformation in an attempt to decrease their exposure to rollover risk. These banks shorten both the maturity of their portfolio of loans as well as the maturity of newly issued loans. We find that the loan yield curve becomes steeper with banks' increasing use of short-term funding. The loan maturity shortening is driven by banks and affects borrowers' financing choices - they turn to the bond market for long-term funding. To the extent that borrowers do not manage to compensate for the undesirable shortening of loan maturities by going to the bond market, they may become more exposed to rollover risk due to banks. This potential synchronization of banks' and borrowers' rollover risk can be a source of financial instability once short-term funding suddenly disappears

Public/private transitions and firm financing

A large body of empirical literature investigates differences in financing structures across firms. Private firms' financing receives little attention due to the lack of data. Using administrative confidential data on the universe of Canadian corporate firms, we compare financing relationships for private and public firms. Leverage ratios are lower for public firms and the difference is almost entirely driven by private firms' stronger reliance on short-term debt. We also find that private and public firms' debt financing responds differently to industry shocks. In periods of positive industry shocks, private firms rely more on long-term debt than public firms, while the former use more short-term debt when industry conditions deteriorate

Sovereign risk and the bank lending channel in Europe.

ABSTRACT: The main purpose of this article is to analyze how sovereign risk influences the loan supply reaction of banks to monetary policy through the bank lending channel. Additionally, we aim to test whether this reaction differs in easy and tight monetary regimes. Using a sample of 3,125 banks from the euro zone between 1999 and 2012, we find that sovereign risk plays an important role in determining loan supply from banks during tight monetary regimes. Banks in higher sovereign risk countries reduce lending more during tight regimes. However, we find little evidence to support any relationship between sovereign risk and loan supply reaction to monetary policy expansions. These results are very interesting for the way monetary policy is conducted in Europe. Banking union, banking system strength, and the budget control of governments would be necessary measures to reduce the heterogeneous transmission of the monetary policy in the euro zone