Knowledge that Transforms

Prior literature examines motivations and impact of corporate lobbying and presents inconclusive evidence. We examine the association of corporate lobbying with firm performance by focusing on how this relationship varies with firm characteristics. Addressing various endogeneity concerns, our analysis shows that corporate lobbying has a negative association with firm performance. We find that the negative association between corporate lobbying and firm performance is largely driven by operationally complex firms. On the other hand, firms with high growth opportunities benefit more from lobbying than low-growth firms. Lobbying seems to provide limited tangible benefits in terms of helping a firm obtain government contracts or successfully pass the congressional bills lobbied. These results suggest that agency costs dominate the strategic benefits of lobbying activities. However, there is some evidence that firms benefit when there is political alignment between the firm and the party in power.

This study investigates the impact of excess cash on the liquidity risk faced by investors and their required liquidity premium. It shows that excess cash improves trading continuity and reduces both liquidity risk and the cost of equity capital. These findings are consistent with the view that firms with excess cash attract more traders even when market liquidity dries up. The increase in investors' trading propensity reduces stock price exposure to shocks to market liquidity and the liquidity premium required by investors. We also examine the impact of excess cash on firm value. We show that while the direct effect of excess cash on firm value is negative, its indirect effect through liquidity is significantly positive, indicating that investors are less likely to sanction (or even reward) illiquid firms for holding excess cash. Further analysis suggests that the liquidity benefits of excess cash are greater for financially constrained firms and firms with high growth opportunities. Our results are robust over time, after addressing endogeneity concerns, and to alternative estimation methods and alternative measures of liquidity.

We examine the determinants of an IPO firm's decision to trade on a when-issued market and find that better quality firms are more likely to trade on this market. Our ‘what-if’ analysis shows that for companies that choose to have when-issued trading, the actual offer price is almost 26% higher than it would have been had these firms chosen not to trade on this market. We interpret this higher offer price as a ‘rent’ that investors pay to acquire shares of such companies. We also show that the informational accuracy of the UK when-issued market is better than that of continental European when-issued markets.

This paper analyzes changes in shareholder value and firm performance in relation to the delay (or lack thereof) in CEO succession. I find that, on average, delay in succession is associated with stronger performance after an unplanned CEO departure. However, the value effect of delay varies and not all firms benefit from long delay. Firms with higher stock price volatility and those whose CEO is hired away experience lower performance. These results suggest that delay affects frictions in the CEO labor market. The impact of delay is particularly important when firms have no succession plan in place.

This study examines investment-cash flow (ICF) sensitivity across international markets and shows that the sensitivity has been stable in poor countries, but has experienced a sharp decline over time in firms located in rich countries. Our results suggest that the growing wealth of economies worldwide and relaxation of financial constraints at the firm level have led to the disappearance of ICF sensitivity in rich, highly developed countries but not in poor developing ones. We show that access to external finance, especially equity finance, is a key channel through which country-level development affects the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flow. Our evidence suggests that the amount of available economic resources and allocation efficiency are two necessary conditions that ensure the viability of the equity channel.

We find that the level of short interest in a firm's stock significantly predicts future seasoned equity offers (SEOs). The probability of an SEO announcement increases by 34% (decreases by 49%) for firms in the top (bottom) quintile of short interest. We identify a causal impact of short interest on SEO issuance using a novel instrument for short interest based on future litigation filings in close geographical proximity to hedge fund centers. Our findings suggest that corporate decisions can be triggered by the aggregate trading activity of sophisticated outside investors.

U.S. sponsors of defined-benefit pension plans integrate their pension plans into their overall financial management. Plan contributions are smaller and funding levels lower for plan sponsors that have less cash, are less profitable and are financially distressed. Moreover, plan sponsors make more aggressive pension plan assumptions if they have lower cash holdings and profit margins. While there is no evidence that plan sponsors generally take more risk with their pension plan assets if they have high business or financial risk, there is some evidence of risk shifting during major economic downturns such as the global financial crisis. As a result, funding rules, pension plan assumptions and investment policies are areas to consider for pension policy to protect plan beneficiaries.

We examine how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), jointly with influential institutional ownership (IO), affects firm value around the 2008 global financial crisis. We find that the effect of CSR on firm value varies with the level of influential institutional ownership and depends upon economic conditions. Using difference-in-difference methods, we show that compared with non-CSR firms, CSR firms have higher firm values before the financial crisis but experience more loss in firm value during the crisis. Our findings suggest that the overall CSR effect depends on the relative dominance of two effects: conflict-resolution and overinvestment effect. In addition, we apply triple difference analysis and show that the relation between CSR and firm value depends upon the level of influential institutional ownership. Specifically, before the crisis, CSR positively affects the value of low institutional ownership firms and the effect is significantly weaker for firms with higher influential IO. During the crisis, the CSR-firm value relation is positive for high institutional ownership firms, suggesting that overinvestment concerns dominate when the crisis occurs. However, such a positive IO effect is not significant for CSR firms with high rollover risks. Our results are supported by a series of robustness tests.

In this article, we explore publication patterns in the Journal of Corporate Finance and discuss scientometric results from 1994 to 2017. We document evidence on the number and size of published papers, collaborative research in terms of coauthorship, editorial board characteristics, and citations as approximations of scientific impact. We identify the most prolific individuals and institutions and discuss how published research has exhibited an increasing number of authors per paper (2.38 on average), how the percentage of USA-based affiliations is gradually decreasing, and how 10.32% of published papers have been written by a member of the editorial board. In an attempt to map the social structure of collaboration in the Journal of Corporate Finance, we studied the social network of coauthors and found that the most prolific authors and institutions are also among the most central ones. We also discovered that the network of coauthorship spreads across 470 connected groups of nodes, the largest of which spans 24.63% of the network.