We show that chief executive officers (CEOs) exhibit a hometown bias in acquisitions. Firms are over twice as likely to acquire targets located in the states of their CEOs’ childhood homes than similar targets domiciled elsewhere. Small, private home-state deals underperform other small, private deals, and the bias is stronger when acquirer governance is lax, suggesting that CEOs acquire private home-state targets for their own benefits. In contrast, large, public home-state acquisitions are value enhancing. CEOs create value in public home-state acquisitions by avoiding extremely poor deals and through deals with higher synergies. Thus, both agency issues and hometown advantages drive home-state acquisitions.

We perform transaction-level analyses of entrusted loans, one of the largest components of shadow banking in China. Entrusted loans involve firms with privileged access to cheap capital channeling funds to less privileged firms, and the increase when credit is tight. Nonaffiliated loans have much higher interest rates than both affiliated loans and official bank loans, and they largely flow into real estate. The pricing of entrusted loans, especially of nonaffiliated loans, incorporates fundamental and informational risks. Stock market reactions suggest that both affiliated and nonaffiliated loans are fairly compensated investments.