We report that traditional seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) are no longer firms' preferred choice for raising seasoned public equity. Traditional offerings have recently been surpassed by shelf-registered offerings in terms of both annual frequency and total capital raised. This represents a dramatic shift from the 1980s, during which the overwhelming majority of firms favored traditional over shelf-registered offerings. We find that the growth in shelf use is related to firms increasingly valuing and using the option feature of shelf registration to defer offerings. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the way firms now use shelf offerings resolves the shelf under-certification problem and results in no larger market penalties and significantly lower underwriter fees relative to non-shelf offerings. Finally, firms often use universal shelf filings and choose between debt and equity offerings based on the prevailing relative market conditions.

We find that firms headquartered in areas with a taste for gambling tend to be more innovative, i.e. they spend more on R&D, and obtain more and better quality patents. These results are supported by several robustness checks, tests to mitigate identification concerns, and analyses of several secondary implications. Investment in innovation makes a stock more lottery-like, a feature desired by individuals with a taste for gambling. Gambling preferences of both local investors and managers appear to influence firms' innovative endeavors and facilitate transforming their industry growth opportunities into firm value.

We investigate whether local religiosity matters for risk-taking by banks. Banks headquartered in more religious areas exhibit lower stock return volatility, lower tail risk, and lower idiosyncratic risk. They also tend to be farther away from default as measured by their z-scores. But these banks command lower market valuations during normal times. These results stand up to several robustness checks, tests for mitigating endogeneity concerns, and are supported by an analysis of bank CEOs' religiosity. Moreover, banks in more religious areas remain less vulnerable to crises. To reduce risk, these banks grow their assets more slowly, hold safer assets, rely less on non-traditional banking, and provide less incentives to their executives to increase risks. Local religiosity has a more pronounced influence on risk-taking by banks for which local investors and managers are more important. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature by uncovering an important and previously unidentified determinant of risk-taking by banks, namely, religion-induced risk aversion.

The Journal of Corporate Finance (JCF) is a highly regarded academic journal specializing in corporate finance. The journal celebrated its silver jubilee year in 2018. We use scientometrics to analyze the journal's impact, prominent topics, most frequent authors, and their affiliated institutions and countries. Using network analysis, we group JCF publications into nine main clusters. Our study depicts the bibliographic couplings of authors and their affiliated institutions and countries, co-citations of journals, and co-occurrences of the authors' specified keywords. Using text mining techniques, we also present the major content of JCF titles, keywords, or abstracts in the form of word clouds.