Research Notes: Prof. Robert Prilmeier

Robert Prilmeier’s paper “This Time Is the Same: Using Bank Performance in 1998 to Explain Bank Performance during the Recent Financial Crisis” was published in the December 2012 issue of the Journal of Finance. The paper, co-authored with Rüdiger Fahlenbrach and René M. Stulz, shows that a bank’s stock return performance during the 1998 crisis strongly predicts its stock return performance and probability of failure during the recent financial crisis. These findings are consistent with persistence in a bank’s risk culture and/or aspects of its business model that make its performance sensitive to crises. Banks that relied more on short‐term funding, had more leverage, and grew more are more likely to be banks that performed poorly in both crises. Prilmeier is an assistant professor of finance at Tulane University’s A. B. Freeman School of Business.