[This article provides a comprehensive analysis of a new and increasingly important phenomenon: the simultaneous holding of both equity and debt claims of the same company by non-commercial banking institutions ("dual holders"). The presence of dual holders offers a unique opportunity to assess the existence and magnitude of shareholder-creditor conflicts. We find that syndicated loans with dual holder participation have loan yield spreads that are 18-32 bps lower than those without. The difference remains economically significant after controlling for the selection effect. Further investigation of dual holders' investment horizons and changes in borrowers' credit quality lends support to the hypothesis that incentive alignment between shareholders and creditors plays an important role in lowering loan yield spreads.]

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of a new and increasingly important phenomenon: the simultaneous holding of both equity and debt claims of the same company by non-commercial banking institutions ("dual holders"). The presence of dual holders offers a unique opportunity to assess the existence and magnitude of shareholder-creditor conflicts. We find that syndicated loans with dual holder participation have loan yield spreads that are 18--32 bps lower than those without. The difference remains economically significant after controlling for the selection effect. Further investigation of dual holders' investment horizons and changes in borrowers' credit quality lends support to the hypothesis that incentive alignment between shareholders and creditors plays an important role in lowering loan yield spreads. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We present the first comprehensive study of mutual fund voting in proxy contests. Among contests where voting takes place, passive funds are 10 percentage points less likely than active funds to vote for dissidents. The gap shrinks significantly when accounting for votes withheld from management nominees, settled contests, and votes by non-“Big-Three” fund families. Passive and active funds are equally informed about firm fundamentals, although passive funds view contest-related SEC filings more often than active funds during contests, in absolute levels and incrementally relative to noncontest periods. We conclude that passive funds are engaged shareholders in high-stakes voting events.

This paper examines how government intervention affects firms' investment and investment efficiency, focusing on the world's largest economic stimulus package (ESP) during the 2008 global financial crisis period. The RMB four trillion ESP aimed to restore the economy by promoting investment in priority areas. Thus it provided an exogenous shock to firms' investment environment and exacerbated the impact of government intervention on firms' investment and investment efficiency. We use propensity score matching to match government-intervened firms with their controls to reduce the endogeneity issue of government intervention. Our difference-in-differences analysis shows that government-intervened firms invested more than control firms. Further analysis shows that the source of funding for investment was mainly from bank loans rather than internal cash flows. However, the post-investment performance was poor. We find that the investment efficiency of government-intervened firms decreased and government-intervened firms overinvested after the ESP. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications and placebo tests. The findings suggest that government intervention can play a negative role in government-intervened firms.

How do corporate bond mutual funds manage liquidity to meet investor redemptions? We show that during tranquil market conditions, these funds tend to reduce liquid asset holdings to meet redemptions, temporarily increasing relative exposures to illiquid asset classes. When aggregate uncertainty rises, however, they tend to scale down their liquid and illiquid assets proportionally to preserve portfolio liquidity. This fund-level dynamic management of liquidity appears to affect the broad financial market: Redemptions from the corporate bond fund sector lead to more corporate bond selling during high-uncertainty periods, which generates price pressures and predicts strong return reversals.

Open-end corporate bond mutual funds invest in illiquid assets while providing liquid claims to shareholders. Does such liquidity transformation introduce fragility to the corporate bond market? To address this question, we create a novel bond-level latent fragility measure based on asset illiquidity of mutual funds holding the bond. We find that corporate bonds bearing higher fragility subsequently experience higher return volatility and more outflows-induced mutual fund selling over the period of 2006–2019. Using the COVID-19 crisis as a natural experiment, we find that bonds with higher precrisis fragility experienced more negative returns and larger reversals around March 2020.

We find a strong and robust positive relationship between individual downside variance premia (DVP)–the difference between risk-neutral and physical expected downside variances–and future corporate bond returns. The spread portfolio that longs the high DVP bond portfolio and shorts the low DVP bond portfolio earns a statistically significant excess return of 0.37% (0.42%) per month in value- (equal-)weighted returns. The alpha estimates from various factor models remain statistically significant and economically substantial. The predictive power of the downside variance premium is stronger in noninvestment-grade (long-maturity) corporate bonds than in investment-grade (short-maturity) bonds. We show that the downside variance premium positively relates to the likelihood of future default and cash flow uncertainty and negatively relates to future cash flows.

In an “activist risk arbitrage,” a shareholder attempts to improve terms of an announced M&A through public campaigns. Activists target deals with low premiums and those susceptible to managerial conflicts of interest, including going‐private deals and deals in which CEOs receive outsized payments. Activist arbitrageurs are associated with a significant decrease in the probability that targets will be sold to the announced bidders, and an increase in the premium paid, both ex post among surviving deals and ex ante among all deals. Activist arbitrage serves as a governance mechanism in M&A and earns higher returns than passive arbitrage.

This paper studies the presence of hedge funds in the Chapter 11 process and their effects on bankruptcy outcomes. Hedge funds strategically choose positions in the capital structure where their actions could have a bigger impact on value. Their presence, especially as unsecured creditors, helps balance power between the debtor and secured creditors. Their effect on the debtor manifests in higher probabilities of the latter's loss of exclusive rights to file reorganization plans, CEO turnover, and adoptions of key employee retention plan, while their effect on secured creditors manifests in higher probabilities of emergence and payoffs to junior claims.