Knowledge that Transforms

We study how firms alter investment projects to mitigate exposure to political uncertainty. We examine deal-level merger data and find that, in addition to delaying and forgoing merger announcements, acquirers shift merger announcements earlier in time to avoid the period between announcement and effective dates overlapping an election, shift targets geographically away from election states, decrease the size of election-year deals, and shift from equity to cash financing for election-year deals. These results are stronger for acquirers with tighter financial constraints and deals more likely to be financed with equity and show financing matters to firms’ responses to election uncertainty.

This research examines the relation between shareholder litigation and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Exploiting exogenous changes in shareholder litigation rights following the staggered adoption of universal demand laws by U.S. states and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling on securities class action lawsuits, we show that weaker shareholder litigation rights lead to lower CSR scores. Moreover, the relation is stronger for firms facing higher litigation risk, and a decreased CSR score enhances firm value. Our evidence suggests that firms engage in CSR activities partly to reduce shareholder litigation risk ex ante and mitigate its consequences ex post.

We present an equilibrium model of hedging for commodity processing firms. We show the optimal hedge ratio depends on the convexity of the firm’s cost function and the elasticity of the supply of the input and the demand for the output. Our calibrated model suggests that hedging tends to be ineffective. When uncertainty comes exclusively from either the supply or from the demand side, updating the hedge dynamically, and using nonlinear contracts improves hedging effectiveness. However, with both supply and demand uncertainty, hedging effectiveness can be low even with option-based and dynamic hedging strategies.

Firms modify their payout policy in anticipation of future litigation costs. We examine a comprehensive sample of U.S. corporate lawsuits and find that firms facing significant litigation risk pay lower dividends, and in some cases omit dividends while distributing more cash through share repurchases. Litigation risk changes the distribution of payouts but not the total payout yield as the increase in share repurchases offsets the decrease in dividends. Cash-poor firms cut share repurchases when settlement costs are incurred. The results suggest that firms at a higher risk of litigation increase their payout flexibility.

I study venture capital firms’ (VCs) use of public market information and how attention to this information relates to private market investment outcomes. I link web traffic to public filings hosted on EDGAR to individual VCs. VCs analyze public information about industry peers before most deals. An increase in industry filing views relates positively to the probability of an exit through acquisition, suggesting that public information helps identify paths to acquisition. The effect is stronger when the VC has less access to private information, especially for low-reputation VCs. Policymakers should consider spillover effects on private markets when setting public disclosure requirements.

We evaluate the cross-sectional predictive ability of a forward-looking monetary policy reaction function, or Taylor rule, in both statistical and economic terms. We find that investors require a premium for holding currency portfolios with high implied interest rates while currency portfolios with low implied rates offer negative currency excess returns. Our forward-looking Taylor rule signals are orthogonal to current nominal interest rates and disconnected from carry trade portfolios and other currency investment strategies. The profitability of the Taylor rule portfolio spread is mainly driven by inflation forecasts rather than the output gap and is robust to data snooping and a wide range of robustness checks.

Managers’ incentives to round up reported earnings per share (EPS) cause an underrepresentation of the number 4 in the first post-decimal digit of EPS, or “quadrophobia.” We develop a novel measure of aggressive financial reporting practices based on a firm’s history of quadrophobia. Quadrophobia is pervasive, persistent, and successfully predicts future restatements, Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions, and class action litigation. It is more pronounced when executive compensation is more closely tied to the stock price and when the firm anticipates violating debt covenants. Quadrophobia is especially strong when rounding-up EPS allows firms to meet analyst expectations, and investors seem not to see through this behavior.

This article provides new evidence on how access to finance affects technological innovation and establishes the role of labor practices in shaping this relation. We exploit a unique setting, pre-Civil War America, where staggered adoption of free banking laws across states encouraged bank entry, and variation in the use of exploited workers in agriculture generated differences in producers’ demands for labor-saving technologies. Results show that access to finance spurred innovation; the positive effect on agricultural innovation diminished with labor exploitation. We establish the causal role of labor exploitation using the 1850s cholera pandemic and the influx of Irish immigrants.

Using a proprietary data set on international private equity activity, we study the determinants of buyout investments across 61 countries and 19 industries over the period of 1990 to 2017. We find that countries with cyclically strong economies, more active stock and credit markets, and better rule of law experience more buyout activity. Countries also receive more buyout capital following investor protection and contract enforcement reforms. The set of determinants we identify appear somewhat unique to buyout investments, because other forms of investment such as foreign direct investment, gross capital formation, investments in R&D, and M&A activity do not respond similarly to these factors.

Using a standardized methodology, we empirically evaluate 55 proposed determinants of capital structure in terms of statistical significance, economic significance, and identification. We find that robust and economically important determinants of debt ratios are relatively few in number. Nevertheless, because each determinant relates to one of five market imperfections—taxes, distress costs, information asymmetry, agency costs, or supply frictions—we draw conclusions from the evidence as a whole regarding the explanatory power of different capital structure theories. We find greater support for pecking order theory and supply-related theories, with less support for traditional tradeoff theory and agency theory.