About

Hosein Maleki is an assistant professor of finance in the Finance and Economics department at Rutgers Business School. His main research interests are in empirical corporate finance, including the political economy of finance, law and finance, distress and bankruptcy, corporate misconduct, and corporate governance. His research has been published in top finance journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics and the Review of Finance. Dr. Maleki has presented his work at prestigious finance conferences, including the NBER Summer Institute, American Finance Association, and SFS Cavalcade North America. His research has also been covered by notable outlets like the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable, Project Syndicate, Duke Law School, and the Stigler Center’s ProMarket.

Research topics

• Business
• Financial system
• Monetary economics
• Economics
• Finance

Selected publications

• When Do Judges Throw the Book at Companies? The Influence of Partisanship in Corporate Prosecutions

  Review of Financial Studies · 2026-02-19

  articleSenior author

  Abstract We document that judges’ political affiliations are strongly associated with the level of judicial penalties levied against companies. For example, Republican-appointed judges impose larger fines for hiring illegal immigrants, while Democrat-appointed judges impose larger fines for pollution- and environment-related violations. Time-series variation suggests that political partisanship, not fixed ideological differences, drives these findings. The differences become amplified when higher-court judicial vacancies exist and in the months before national elections. Our findings highlight the importance of political polarization for U.S. companies and illustrate how judicial composition can affect firms’ incentive to avoid violating laws connected to partisan issues.

  PublisherDOI

• When She Fails: Women Entrepreneurs and Gender Gaps in Business Bankruptcy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Attention Allocation and Price Discovery

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Media, inventors, and corporate innovation

  Journal of Empirical Finance · 2025-10-10

  articleOpen access

  We examine the impact of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest conservative media network in the US local TV markets, on corporate innovation following its staggered expansion across the country. We find a significant reduction in innovation output two to three years after Sinclair entry. As a larger proportion of inventors self-identify as left-leaning, we find that the effect runs through two mutually non-exclusive channels: the inventor productivity channel and the talent replacement channel. Inventors become less innovative when they stay in Sinclair-exposed firms, and firms face challenges replacing departed talent upon the local ideology shock induced by Sinclair. • We use the expansion of Sinclair Broadcast Group as exogeneous shocks to local media environments and study its effects on corporate innovation. • We find a significant reduction in innovation output measured by both patent counts and citations, within two to three years of Sinclair entry. • The post-Sinclair decline exists in related and unrelated patents, in patent originality and generality, in the economic value of patents, in breakthrough patents and not so useful patents, and in innovation efficiency. • We find supporting evidence for two mechanisms: the inventor productivity channel and the talent replacement channel.

  PublisherDOI

• Media, Inventors, and Corporate Innovation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Bank Entry Barriers and Firms’ Risk-Taking

  The Accounting Review · 2024-11-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT We study how nonfinancial firms’ operating risks change after bank competition increases. By exploiting the 1990s staggered regulatory reforms across U.S. states that allowed interstate banking and branching, we show that out-of-state bank entry was associated with lower borrower risk-taking on average. Large, profitable, safe, and geographically diversified firms signed up as new clients of large entrant banks, which offered larger and cheaper loans that reflected their higher efficiency and risk reduction through geographical diversification. We argue that these large banks could substitute for local relationship lending with more data collection from branches in multiple states. Firms that began borrowing from entrant banks increased capital expenditures and project-specific financing and kept R&D expenses stable but reduced R&D risk. Firms that continued borrowing from incumbent banks paid higher interest rates and increased their risk, suggesting that their credit access fell. States that opened up more had bigger changes in these outcomes. Data availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G21; G28; G32.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Political Ideology and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from the Expansion of a Local TV Network

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Do Country-Level Creditor Protections Affect Firm-Level Debt Structure Concentration?

  European Finance Review · 2021-04-22 · 49 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract We study the effects of country-level creditor protections on the firm-level choice of debt structure concentration. Using data from forty-six countries, we show that firms form more concentrated debt structures in countries with stronger creditor protection. We propose a trade-off framework of optimal debt structure and show that in strong creditor rights regimes, the benefit of forming concentrated structures outweighs its cost. Because strong creditor protections increase liquidation bias, firms choose concentrated debt structures to improve the probability of successful distressed debt renegotiations. Firms with ex ante higher bankruptcy costs, including those with higher intangibility, cash flow volatility, R&D expenses, and leverage, exhibit stronger effects. Firms with restricted access to capital are also affected more. A difference-in-differences analysis of firms’ debt structure responses to creditor rights reforms confirms the cross-country results. Our findings are robust to alternative settings and a battery of robustness checks.

  PublisherDOI

• Reaching for Influence: Do Banks Use Loans to Establish Political Connections?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Policy uncertainty and corporate credit spreads

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2020-07-02 · 324 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mahsa Kaviani

  14 shared

• Lawrence Kryzanowski

  7 shared

• Pavel G. Savor

  DePaul University

  4 shared

• Kose John

  4 shared

• Sudipta Basu

  3 shared

• Lily Li

  2 shared

• Yuqi Gu

  Atkins (United States)

  2 shared

• Jess Cornaggia

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared