This study develops a theoretical model to analyze the asset substitution problem over insurance decisions. We find that agency conflict is related to a firm’s risk level and capital structure. In particular, at the optimal leverage, agency conflict occurs only when the risk level is relatively high, which explains why insurance covenants are typically for significant pure risks. Moreover, when the risk level is specified, agency conflict over insurance decisions occurs within a specific leverage range. This is consistent with the findings of some research on the asset substitution problem over speculative risk choices. In addition, we consider premium loadings and conclude that full hedging is not a firm’s optimal risk management strategy, contributing to the literature on optimal hedging decisions with transaction frictions. Our framework with premium loadings can also explain many insurance phenomena, such as risk retention for small losses and subsidies for catastrophe insurance.

The CARD Act restricts consumer credit card issuers’ ability to raise interest rates. We examine whether the Act influences the degree to which an issuer adjusts offered interest rates in response to changes in interest rates offered by other lenders in credit card solicitations—the price responsiveness. Using small business card offers as a control group, we find a significant decline in the price responsiveness after the Act. The decline is concentrated among other lenders’ rate reductions rather than rate increases and is more pronounced in areas with more subprime borrowers. The results underscore an unintended consequence of regulating the consumer credit market.

Governments provide bank guarantees, such as deposit insurance. While risk effects are well researched, impacts on bank output remain largely unexplored. We investigate bank output effects using data from 75 countries/regions on bank liquidity creation, a comprehensive bank output measure. We address reverse causality, examining home-country guarantee effects on liquidity creation by subsidiary banks in foreign host nations, and mitigate omitted-variables concerns with host country × year fixed effects and home country controls. Findings suggest home-country guarantees decrease subsidiary bank liquidity creation up to 10%, and hold prior to, during, and after the Global Financial Crisis.

This paper examines how chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence affects firms’ choice of corporate debt issuance. We find that firms with overconfident CEOs tend to issue more private debt, especially bank loans, than public bonds compared with firms with nonoverconfident CEOs. The effect of CEO overconfidence is more pronounced when default spreads are wide, when gross domestic product growth is slow, during recessions, and among firms that face high distress and cash flow risk. Furthermore, the relationship between CEO overconfidence and bank loan issuance depends on collateralization; however, our main finding is not driven by debt maturity. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we investigate matched samples and a subsample with exogenous CEO turnover events and find supportive and statistically stronger results.

We document that leased capital constitutes about 30% of the total productive physical assets used by US public firms. We develop an analytical framework to demonstrate how the neglect of leases leads to an overestimation of productivity. This overestimation can be decomposed into two distinct channels: one arises from the mismeasured factor share, and the other from the omitted-leased-capital channel. Empirically, we find that the overestimation of aggregate productivity is substantial, has been increasing over time, and exhibits strong countercyclicality. In the cross-section, the decomposition of overestimation presents asymmetric patterns for firms of different sizes and levels of financial constraint. Our findings highlight the critical importance of explicitly accounting for the “unmeasured” leased capital in studies on productivity measurements.

This paper investigates the impact of institutional herding on stock price formation, conditional on firms’ credit ratings, using 13F data from 1986 to 2019. In line with the current literature, we find herding intensity is driven by past returns consistent with momentum trading; however, we also find that herding is more sensitive to past returns for non-investment grade (NIG) stocks than investment grade (IG) stocks, resulting in a market bifurcation. We then examine the price impact of these trades and find that herding in NIG equities enhances price discovery. One plausible explanation is that information gradually diffuses within non-investment grade stocks, and herding behavior strengthens information discovery. Finally, we show both momentum-triggered herding and non-momentum-triggered herding contribute to price discovery among non-investment grade stocks.

Recent reform in China has made a subset of Chinese stocks available to foreign investors, partially opening up China's stock market. Our difference-in-differences analysis shows that this liberalization reform boosts investments in investable firms relative to noninvestable ones, with results robust to various sensitivity analyses. Besides capital inflows and risk sharing, a potential but underexplored channel is improved corporate governance due to direct and indirect pressures from foreign investors, which lowers the cost of capital and improves capital allocation efficiency. Consistent with this corporate governance channel, we find that the liberalization reform reduces investable firms’ agency costs, increases their investment efficiency and total factor productivity, and improves their operating performance. Further analysis finds that the positive investment effect from the liberalization reform is stronger among firms that were poorly governed before the reform.

In recent years, firms have increasingly come under scrutiny from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating agencies which systematically assess and publicize ESG-related information to diverse stakeholders. This study aims to investigate whether firms exhibit a heightened incentive to avoid ESG-related regulatory violations once they come under the coverage of ESG rating agencies. Analyzing data spanning from 2000 to 2018 and considering the coverage provided by four prominent ESG rating agencies to U.S. firms, we leverage the staggered initiation and intensity of this coverage. Our findings reveal a negative correlation between ESG violations and the commencement and extent of coverage by ESG rating agencies. This relationship is particularly pronounced for firms characterized by lower levels of corporate monitoring as indicated by fewer analysts providing coverage, limited media attention, weaker ESG commitments, and less disparate ESG ratings. Taken together, our study sheds light on the monitoring role of ESG rating agencies, illustrating their significance in incentivizing managers to mitigate ESG violations.

During the 2015 stock market crisis, the Chinese government used hundreds of billions of dollars to purchase shares directly in the secondary market. We find that compared with non-rescued firms, rescued firms have significantly lower liquidity after being rescued. Policy uncertainty regarding subsequent interventions better explains the reduction in liquidity than the liquidity dry-up and bad firm signaling hypotheses. Inconsistent with the potential moral hazards associated with government bailouts, the investment policies of rescued firms become more conservative after being rescued. Our evidence warns of the unintended consequences of direct purchase rescue programs.