Abstract I show that households’ demand for retail deposits decreases during stock market booms, which induces a contraction in bank lending and a decrease in real activity in bank-dependent firms. I identify this channel using geographic heterogeneity in households’ stock market participation. Banks in areas with greater stock ownership see a greater reduction in deposit growth when stock returns are high. This holds even across branches of the same bank and across ZIP codes within counties. Counties served by banks financed by more stock-active depositors see a greater decline in bank lending and bank-dependent-firm employment following high stock returns.

Because the personal tax treatments of interest and dividend income likely affect the relative cost of debt and equity financing, a sharp change in tax treatment could affect firms' optimal leverage. This paper examines the effect of the 2003 equity income tax cut on firms' debt usage. Because this tax cut affected only individual investors, we can use a difference-in-differences method to identify the effect of personal tax on firms' leverage. Previous research has found that the 2003 tax cut encouraged dividend payouts and reduced the cost of equity, but it provides no link to equilibrium leverage ratios. We estimate that the tax cut causes the affected firms' leverage to decrease by about 5 percentage points. Furthermore, we show that the effects of the tax cut are stronger for firms with lower marginal corporate tax rates and for firms that are not financially constrained, consistent with our theoretical predictions. Overall, we find strong evidence that personal tax is an important determinant of firms' optimal leverage.

The rapid increase in U.S. house prices during the 2001–2006 period was accompanied by a historically rapid expansion of bank assets. We exploit cross-regional variation in local housing booms to study how housing demand shocks affected the growth of the banking sector. We estimate the effect of housing demand shocks that are orthogonal to observed non-housing demand shocks and credit supply shocks in each bank’s market area. We employ several instrumental variables that plausibly identify variation in local housing demand that is exogenous to local banks. We find that the housing boom had a large effect on bank asset growth—the cross-regional elasticity of bank growth with respect to housing demand shocks is around 0.6. The regional elasticity estimate suggests that housing demand shocks can potentially account for a large fraction of the growth of the banking sector during this period.

Theory and recent evidence suggest that overvalued firms can create value for shareholders if they exploit their overvaluation by using their stock as currency to purchase less overvalued firms. We challenge this idea and show that, in practice, overvalued acquirers significantly overpay for their targets. These acquisitions do not, in turn, lead to synergy gains. Moreover, these acquisitions seem to be concentrated among acquirers with the largest governance problems. CEO compensation, not shareholder value creation, appears to be the main motive behind acquisitions by overvalued acquirers.

We study the effect of property rights institutions in host countries, the institutions protecting investors from expropriation by host country agents, on the geographic structure and valuation of US multinational corporations (MNCs). We provide firm-level evidence that better property rights attract investment from MNCs. We disentangle the effects of the Stulz (2005) “twin agency problems” in the context of foreign direct investment and show that our results are not driven by legal institutions protecting investors from expropriation by corporate insiders. Further, we show that changes in the quality of property rights in locations where MNCs operate have material impact on MNCs’ valuations.