Knowledge that Transforms

We examine how bank size affects borrowers, when information asymmetry is not particularly severe. Our sample comprises 20,806 loan facilities granted to 3625 US public firms. After minimizing endogeneity concerns, we find that there is a positive relation between bank size and firm value, after the origination of the loan. Firms that borrow from large banks invest more, grow faster and have higher risk, proxied by earnings volatility. The effects are concentrated in borrowers which are ex-ante (pre-loan) safer (low leverage or high Z-score) and muted, but not negative, in riskier firms. We highlight the bright side of large banks.

We find that board gender diversity increases the likelihood that firms announce a buyback but long-term excess returns are significantly smaller when there is larger female representation on the board. This is consistent with the governance hypothesis: gender diversity makes it more likely that firms buy back stock to reduce agency costs of free cash flow. But because gender diversity improves the quality of public information disclosure repurchases are less driven by market timing. Moreover, when the quality of monitoring is lower because board members sit on many other boards, long-term excess returns are larger.

We analyze whether banks and industrial companies have equal access to debt markets through reputable underwriters and explore the determinants of that matching for both types of firms. Using a sample of European corporate bonds during the years 2003–2013, we find that the odds of matching with a reputable underwriter were about 1.5 times greater for non-financial companies than for banks. The odds of matching with a reputable underwriter were 10.92 times lower for a bank during the crisis. As for the determinants of the matching probability, the marginal effect of the bond size on the matching probability is 1.70 larger for non-financial firms than for banks. Furthermore, the effect of bond size is greater for large non-financial companies than for large banks while the effect of maturity is larger for banks than for non-financial companies.

This study demonstrates that, apart from managerial agency problem, shareholders' intolerance of failure also deteriorates managerial innovation incentives in public firms. Furthermore, management buyouts improve the innovation intensity, even if managers gain no excess value from the buyouts in collaboration with private equity firms. The study provides insights into the interrelation between firms' innovation, corporate governance, and dividend policy. It presents a rationale behind empirical evidence of a positive relationship between management buyouts and innovation intensity. It provides empirical implications on firms' characteristics that facilitate management buyouts and the return and risk structure of private equity firms.

Higher default probabilities are associated with lower future stock returns. The anomaly cannot be explained by strategic shareholder actions, traditional risk factors, characteristics, or mispricing, but, instead, is consistent with a risk-shifting hypothesis. Consistent with the risk-shifting hypothesis, we find that distressed firms tend to overinvest, destroy value, and exhaust their cash flows. Effects are concentrated in firms with wide credit spreads, firms with no convertible debt, and in cases where CEOs receive above-average equity-based compensation. As default risk rises, credit spreads rise, equity betas fall, and equity returns fall.

Using insights from prosecuted cases, we present compelling evidence of large-trade based manipulation in a sizeable number of Indian IPOs that, in all likelihood escaped enforcement actions. Consistent with the pump-and-dump scheme these IPOs exhibit abnormally high volume of large trades, a significant fraction of which originates from a syndicate of traders present in the prosecuted IPOs. More importantly, stock price in the manipulated IPOs rises initially on account of artificial trades, but then declines significantly as the manipulators exit the market. Interestingly, not all attempts at manipulation are entirely successful as stock price in some of the manipulated IPOs crash on the first day of listing.

U.S. antitrust agencies claim their antitrust enforcement mission is to protect consumers, promote fair competition, and maintain efficiency. Are antitrust practices consistent with this claim? We explore this question by examining antitrust selection of horizontal merger cases in the U.S. manufacturing sector during 1980–2009. We find that antitrust agencies are more likely to intervene when foreign import pressure is low, merger industry concentration hits a hurdle level, or local or less specialized rivals suffer unfavorable wealth effects. We find no evidence that antitrust agencies systematically respond to the wealth effects of either customers in general or more affected customers. Our findings can be a useful reference for calibrating the efficiency of antitrust regulation and enforcement.

In contrast to prior studies suggesting that overallotment option (OAO) provisions reflect underwriters' exploitation of IPO firms, we provide evidence that issuers benefit in several ways. We estimate that OAO provisions lead to lower total issue cost, less negative post-IPO performance, lower post-IPO volatility, and larger IPOs. OAO provisions are more likely for large firms undertaking relatively large IPOs, especially where a large portion of the shares are offered by selling shareholders. Our evidence also indicates that managers and other insiders may benefit if their shareholdings would be locked up unless the OAO call option feature was exercised.

In this study, we analyze employee litigation and other work-related complaints to examine if the judicial process favors firms that engage in lobbying. We gather data for 27,794 employee lawsuits (after their initial court hearings) filed between 2000 and 2014 and test the relationship between employee allegations and firms' lobbying strategies. We find that employee litigation increases the number of labor-related bills in our sample. We document that an increase in employee lawsuits may drive firms into lobbying to change policy proposals. We also find robust evidence that case outcomes are different for lobbying firms compared to non-lobbying rivals, which may protect shareholder wealth in the long run. Our results suggest lobbying activities may make a significant difference in the effects of employee lawsuits. Our findings highlight the benefit of building political capital to obtain biased outcomes in favor of politically connected firms.

Using the high-power setting of newly privatized firms from 64 countries, we examine the relationship between ownership type and firm-level capital allocations as captured by the sensitivity of investment expenditure to investment opportunities. Consistent with our predictions that government and foreign institutional owners are associated with different levels of information asymmetry and agency problems, we find strong and robust evidence that government (foreign) ownership weakens (strengthens) investment-Q sensitivity, thereby increasing investment inefficiency (efficiency). Moreover, we find that the relation between foreign ownership and investment efficiency is stronger when governments relinquish control and country-level governance institutions are weaker. Overall, our findings highlight the important role of ownership type in determining firms' investment behavior and efficiency.