Knowledge that Transforms

How do changes in banking regulation affect the syndicated loan market? Because branch networks and loan syndication both enable banks to diversify geographical credit risk, we investigate the staggered implementation of the Riegle–Neal Interstate Branching and Banking Efficiency Act of 1994. Exploiting that the act only changed the legal framework for out-of-state commercial banks, we find that branching deregulation decreased syndicated loan issuance but spurred bilateral lending to corporations. Consistent with a supply-driven substitution effect, this shift is also reflected in interest rate spreads. Our results suggest that changes to banking regulation can substantially alter credit allocation across loan types.

We use the introduction of direct flights as an exogenous shock to the travel time between mutual funds and firms to estimate the causal effects of proximity on fund investment decisions and performance. We find that a fund invests significantly more in firms that become more proximate following the introduction of direct flights and that these more proximate investments exhibit superior performance. Our findings are robust to including a variety of fixed effects and potential confounders such as firm-level shocks, fund-level shocks, and time trends. Collectively, our results indicate that proximity enhances investors’ ability to acquire value-relevant information about firms.

We study how media coverage impacts pricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) around the world. Higher media coverage in the pre-IPO period leads to lower IPO initial returns. The effect is mitigated in countries with better financial reporting quality, greater shareholder rights protection, and more stringent media censorship, and for IPOs “certified” by reputable intermediaries, while it is amplified in countries with higher levels of media penetration and media trust. Further, IPOs with higher pre-IPO media coverage have lower ex post price revision volatility. Our findings suggest that higher pre-IPO media coverage reduces information asymmetry among investors, leading to less underpriced IPOs.

We develop a multi-country model with moral hazard and noise traders and show that investor sentiment should affect employment growth both domestically and abroad. Using a large sample of international industry-level data, we find strong support for the model’s predictions. We show that U.S. investor sentiment has a positive association with labor market conditions around the world, due to spillover effects as well as foreign direct investments from the United States. We also find that U.S. sentiment amplifies the negative effect of local financial crises on job losses, which supports the idea that financial development has a “dark side.”

We develop a theoretical model providing a new rationale for venture capitalist (VC) syndicate formation and empirically test our model predictions. An entrepreneur obtains financing and two different value-adding inputs from a single VC or from two different VCs, each operating in his area of expertise. We characterize the entrepreneur’s equilibrium choice between contracting with a single VC, individually with multiple VCs, or with a VC syndicate. We show that syndicates mitigate VCs’ moral hazard problem in value addition. We also analyze the dynamics of VC syndicate composition. The results of our empirical analysis are consistent with our model’s predictions.

I compare the U.S. capacity expansion decisions of public and private producers of 7 commodity chemicals from 1989 to 2006. I find that private firms invest differently than public firms. Private firms are more likely than public firms to increase capacity prior to a positive demand shock (an increase in price and quantity) and less likely to increase capacity before a negative demand shock. Potential mechanisms include public firm overextrapolation of past demand shocks and agency problems arising from greater separation between ownership and control.

We document significant differences in the financing structures of small firms with managers of diverse cultural backgrounds. To isolate the effect of culture, we exploit cultural heterogeneity within a geographical area with shared regulations, institutions, and macroeconomic cycles. Our findings suggest significant cultural differences in the preference toward debt funding and in the use of formal and informal sources of financing (bank loans and trade credit). Our results are robust to alternative explanations based on potential differences in credit constraints and in the distribution of cultural origins across industries, trading partners, and headquarters locations.

Does option-based compensation affect payout policy? To address this question, we examine the adoption of mandatory expensing of stock options. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that the reduction in option-based compensation after the accounting change varies with the firm-specific expected accounting impact. Across a battery of tests, we do not find that (accounting-driven) reductions in option-based pay cause dividends to increase or repurchases to decrease. Our results contrast with the widely held belief that option-based pay has a significant causal influence on payout policy and cast doubts on its role in the shift from dividends to repurchases.

We distinguish between "good" and "bad" carry trades constructed from G-10 currencies. The good trades exhibit higher Sharpe ratios and sometimes positive return skewness, in contrast to the bad trades that have both substantially lower Sharpe ratios and highly negative return skewness. Surprisingly, good trades do not involve the most typical carry currencies like the Australian dollar and Japanese yen. The distinction between good and bad carry trades significantly alters our understanding of currency carry trade returns, and invalidates, for example, explanations invoking return skewness and crash risk.

In this article, we evaluate the effect of managerial entrenchment on corporate information production using the voting outcomes of shareholder-initiated proposals intended to mitigate managerial entrenchment. We focus on the proposals that are passed or rejected by a small margin of votes, which generate plausibly exogenous variations in managerial entrenchment. We find that a reduction in managerial entrenchment enhances corporate information production. The effects are stronger for firms with greater information asymmetries and severer agency frictions. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the view that reducing managerial entrenchment enhances corporate disclosure by aligning the incentives of managers and shareholders.