We investigate how government interventions such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. These issues are critical for stability, access to finance, and economic growth. Exploiting cross-country and cross-time variation in the timing of interventions and accounting for their nonrandomness, we document that liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations trigger large increases in competition. We also find some more nuanced evidence that zombie banks’ market shares in crisis countries evolve together with interventions. A higher frequency of interventions coincides with greater zombie bank presence, and increases in competition are larger when zombie banks occupy bigger market shares.

This paper studies the optimal consumption and portfolio problem of an investor with recursive preferences who is subject to time-varying margin requirements. The level of the requirements at each moment is determined by contemporaneous volatility of returns, which is stochastic and may have jumps. I show that the nonstandard hedging demand produced by margin requirements increases with their persistence and volatility. However, for realistic values of parameters, the hedging demand is small even in the presence of jumps, and contemporaneous jumps in prices have a much stronger effect on optimal portfolio than jumps in constraints.

Using a data set of Korean business groups in the period 1999–2006, just after the Asian Financial Crisis, this study shows how business groups’ financial leverage can lead group-affiliated firms to lose market share to industry rivals. This analysis reveals that the negative effect of group leverage is greater when an affiliated firm is financially weak. Additionally, high group leverage is more detrimental to firms operating in fast-growing industries, discouraging affiliated firms from investing while encouraging their rivals. The results suggest that groups’ financial positions encompass a substantial strategic dimension of group-affiliated firms.

We provide evidence on the valuation of equity positions by hedge funds. Reported valuations deviate from standard valuations based on closing prices from the Center for Research in Security Prices for roughly 7% of the positions. These equity valuation deviations are positively related to illiquidity and price volatility of the underlying stocks. They respond to past performance and intensify after an advisor starts reporting to a commercial database. Furthermore, advisors with more valuation deviations show a stronger discontinuity in their reported returns around 0, manage a higher fraction of potentially fraudulent funds, report smoother returns, and exhibit an upward spike in their December reported returns.

We test for the presence of a systematic tail risk premium in the cross section of expected returns by applying a measure of the sensitivity of assets to extreme market downturns, the tail beta. Empirically, historical tail betas help predict the future performance of stocks in extreme market downturns. During a market crash, stocks with historically high tail betas suffer losses that are approximately 2 to 3 times larger than their low-tail-beta counterparts. However, we find no evidence of a premium associated with tail betas. The theoretically additive and empirically persistent tail betas can help assess portfolio tail risks.

We conduct a comprehensive comparison of market beta estimation techniques. We study the performance of several historical, time-series model, and option-implied estimators for estimating realized market beta. Thereby, we find the hybrid methodology of Buss and Vilkov to consistently outperform all other approaches. In addition, all other approaches, including fully implied and dynamic conditional beta, based on generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models, are dominated by a simple beta estimate based on historical (co-)variances and an approach based on the Kalman filter. Our conclusions remain unchanged after performing several robustness checks.

We analyze the profitability of government-owned banks’ lending to their owners, using a unique data set of relatively homogeneous government-owned banks; the banks are all owned by similarly structured local governments in a single country. Making use of a natural experiment that altered the regulatory and competitive environment, we find evidence that such lending was used to transfer revenues from the banks to the governments. Some of the evidence is particularly pronounced in localities where the incumbent politicians face significant competition for reelection.

We model how a rent-protection motive drives the choice of flotation method in new equity issuance between two polar cases: rights issues and cash offers. Unexpected new blockholders would emerge in control-diluting cash offers and share in jealously guarded control benefits. But rights issues help the incumbent controlling shareholders avoid control dilution and safeguard their private benefits. Under asymmetric information about private benefits, the choice of flotation method can convey information about hidden private benefits and hence firm value. Our model can explain even a negative announcement effect of rights issues, and it supports not just one but three important equilibriums.