For the last two decades, firms with higher debt have reduced their employment more often, used more part time and seasonal employees, paid lower wages, and funded pension plans less generously. These effects are economically significant and cannot be explained by variation in performance. Thus debt seems to discipline the employment relationship. However, this result reflects a clear historical reversal, during the years 1967–73, of the opposite effect that prevailed in the 1950s. Apparently some of the disciplinary effects of debt are driven by forces that emerged during the period now colloquially referred to as the Sixties.

ABSTRACT We examine 1,948 share lockup agreements that prevent insiders from selling their shares in the period immediately after the IPO (typically 180 days). While lockups are in effect, there is little selling by insiders. When lockups expire, we find a permanent 40 percent increase in average trading volume, and a statistically prominent three‐day abnormal return of −1.5 percent. The abnormal return and volume are much larger when the firm is financed by venture capital, and we find that venture capitalists sell more aggressively than executives and other shareholders. We find limited support for several hypotheses that may explain the abnormal return, but no complete explanation.

We find that firms protected by “second generation” state antitakeover laws substantially reduce their use of debt, and that unprotected firms do the reverse. This result supports recent models in which the threat of hostile takeover motivates managers to take on debt they would otherwise avoid. An implication is that legal barriers to takeovers may increase corporate slack.

We test the hypothesis that insider trading impairs market liquidity by analyzing intraday trades and quotes around 1,497 IPO lockup expirations in the period 1995–1999. We find that, while lockup expirations are associated with considerable insider trading for some IPO firms, they have little effect on effective spreads. By contrast, two other liquidity measures, quote depth and trading activity, improve substantially. In the 23% of lockup expirations where insiders disclose share sales, spreads actually decline. These findings indicate that a large body of well-informed, blockholding insider traders can enter a market from which they had previously been absent, and substantially change trading volume and share price without impairing market liquidity.

We find that firms protected by “second generation” state antitakeover laws substantially reduce their use of debt, and that unprotected firms do the reverse. This result supports recent models in which the threat of hostile takeover motivates managers to take on debt they would otherwise avoid. An implication is that legal barriers to takeovers may increase corporate slack.