This paper presents a political economy model where there is mutual feedback between investor protection and stock market development. Better investor protection induces companies to issue more equity and thereby leads to a broader stock market. In turn, equity issuance expands the shareholder base and increases support for shareholder protection. This feedback loop can generate multiple equili...

Using takeover protection as an indicator of corporate governance, this study examines how an exogenous shift in power from shareholders to managers affects corporate attention to nonshareholding stakeholders. Two competing hypotheses are entertained. The shareholder view predicts that stronger takeover protection will lead to a decrease in corporate attention to shareholders and non-shareholdi...

We examine the value consequences of corporate social responsibility through the lens of institutional shareholders. We find a sharp asymmetry between corporate policies that mitigate the firm’s exposure to environmental risk and those that enhance its perceived environmental friendliness (“greenness”). Institutional investors shun stocks with high environmental risk exposure, which we show hav...

Risk capital is the contribution of an exposure to the default risk of a financial institution. We investigate its relationship with required shareholder returns, showing that the use of return on risk capital (RAROC) as a risk-adjusted performance measure is inconsistent with the standard theory of financial valuation and that using this one measure to represent at the same time both contribut...