Knowledge that Transforms

Corporate culture constitutes a key success factor in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We examine the role of acquirer-target cultural differences in US domestic M&A deals. We train a topic model on how employees describe corporate culture in free-response texts of crowdsourced employer reviews to estimate cultural differences between the acquirer-target pairs. We find a negative linear relationship between cultural differences and deal announcement returns. However, adding a squared term of our main variable of interest to our model reveals a U-shaped relationship between cultural differences and announcement returns that is stronger in magnitude and statistical significance than the single term alone. Our results reconcile two competing hypotheses on the role of cultural differences in M&A.

We develop flexible local projections to quantify the relative contributions of expected discount rates and cash flows to the variation of dividend yields. Local projections enable the incorporation of large information sets, the use of monthly data along with annual data, and the consideration of time variation in the dividend yield decomposition. By expanding the set of state variables and allowing for time-varying parameters, our results show that the variation of expected discount rates remains the primary contributor to market volatility, whereas the contribution of expected cash flows is considerably smaller.

We examine the effect of corporate violations on bank loan contracting and document that borrowers with higher corporate violation penalties have higher loan costs. Higher corporate violations are also associated with more restrictive covenants and a higher likelihood of a collateral requirement. The increasing effect of corporate violations on loan costs is concentrated in opaque firms or those subject to more competitive markets or ineffective monitoring. Firms with higher violation penalties have lower future performance and a higher number of future violations. Overall, our results demonstrate that banks factor corporate violations into their lending decisions, thus shedding new light on the economic consequences of corporate violations through the creditors’ lens.

We study the debt-stabilizing properties of indexing debt to GDP using a consumption-based macro-finance model. To this end, we derive quasi-analytical pricing formulas for any type of bond/equity by exploiting the discretization of the state-space, making large-scale simulations tractable. We find that GDP-linked security prices would embed time-varying risk premiums of about 40 basis points. For a fixed budget surplus, issuing GDP-linked securities does not imply more beneficial debt-to-GDP ratios in the long-run, while the debt-stabilizing budget surplus is more predictable at the expense of being higher. Our findings call into question the view that such securities tame debt.

We investigate the impact of deregulation-induced banking competition on corporate credit risk. Although banking competition does not, on average, affect corporate bankruptcy rates, we find that it causes corporate bankruptcies to increase significantly for high-leverage firms. We show that higher borrowing costs for high-leverage firms post-deregulation and the resulting credit rationing may be key factors behind our findings. The effect of deregulation lasts for up to seven years after the introduction of deregulation and originates mainly from firms that have high short-term debt and are financially constrained. Our results suggest that banking competition, which is expected to expand lending and reduce its cost, may, in fact, create more challenging credit conditions, particularly for firms that are more heavily dependent on external funding.

We study the general equilibrium implications of the corporate tax shield in a growth economy that taxes household income and firm profits and redistributes tax revenues. Our stylized model predicts that in general equilibrium the tax shield's reduction of the corporate after-tax borrowing rate is counteracted (but not fully eliminated) by an increase in the pre-tax rate.

How does the salience and structure of costs for financial advice influence consumer demand? This study conducts a randomized choice experiment exploring possible consequences of introducing a commission ban in the retail mortgage market. A sample of more than 2,100 participants of the Dutch Household Survey panel reveals that in a fee-based regime, in which the costs of advice are salient and must be paid upfront, demand for advice decreases by 25 percent compared with a situation in which the same costs are embedded in mortgage payments. We do not find evidence that such demand effects for financial advice varies across less versus more sophisticated customers. At the same time, we do find that customers with a stronger focus on the present express less willingness to pay for advice upfront.

Based on European RMBS deals with 24 million quarterly loan observations, we examine the effect of risk retention on bank behavior. We show that retention deals perform better due to improved monitoring effort and workout processes. We find that the probability of rating changes and collateral revaluations is higher for retention loans, and ratings are more accurate; retention loans have a lower probability of becoming non-performing, a lower delinquency amount, and a shorter time in arrears. Moreover, non-performing and defaulted retention loans are more likely to recover. Reduced losses for deals with retention are associated with lower default rates, lower exposures at default, and higher recovery rates. Our results suggest that retention reduces moral hazard and incentivizes banks to exert higher effort, which results in superior securitized asset performance.

How do banks offer and price mortgages when an online platform enables them to reach regions where they have no branches? With unique data on responses from differently located banks to each applying household and a shift-share instrument for market concentration, we find banks to make more and cheaper offers to more concentrated local markets. We rationalize this as investments in lucrative market shares given customer switching costs. Banks also improve their inter-regional portfolio diversification with more attractive offers to regions more complementary to their home locales. Finally, banks` choices become increasingly automated, reducing their operating costs.