[Panel data on corporate ownership in thirty-four countries between 1995 and 2006 reveal that newly public firms have concentrated ownership regardless of the level of investor protection. After listing, firms in countries with strong investor protection are more likely to experience decreases in ownership concentration; these decreases occur in response to growth opportunities, and they are associated with new share issuance. We conclude that ownership concentration falls after listing in countries with strong investor protection, because firms in these countries continue to raise capital and grow, diluting blockholders as a consequence.]
[We establish Markovian models in the Heath, Jarrow, and Morton (1992) paradigm that permit an exponential affine representation of riskless and risky bond prices while offering significant flexibility in the choice of volatility structures. Estimating models in our family is typically no more difficult than in the workhorse affine family. Besides diffusive and jump-induced default correlations, defaults can impact the credit spreads of surviving firms, allowing for a greater clustering of defaults. Numerical implementations highlight the importance of incorporating interest rate-credit spread correlations, credit spread impact factors, and the full credit spread curve when building a unified framework for pricing credit derivatives.]
[At what point in a firm's life should it go public? How do a firm's ex ante product market characteristics relate to its going-public decision? Further, what are the implications of a firm going public on its post-IPO operating and product market performance? In this article, we answer the above questions by conducting the first large sample study of the going-public decisions of U.S. firms in the literature. We use the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) of the U.S. Census Bureau, which covers the entire universe of private and public U.S. manufacturing firms. Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, a private firm's product market characteristics (total factor productivity [TFP], size, sales growth, market share, industry competitiveness, capital intensity, and cash flow riskiness) significantly affect its likelihood of going public after controlling for its access to private financing (venture capital or bank loans). Second, private firms facing less information asymmetry and those with projects that are cheaper for outsiders to evaluate are more likely to go public. Third, as more firms in an industry go public, the concentration of that industry increases in subsequent years. The above results are robust to controlling for the interactions between various product market and firm-specific variables. Fourth, IPOs of firms occur at the peak of their productivity cycle: the dynamics of TFP and sales growth exhibit an inverted U-shaped pattern, both in our univariate analysis and in our multivariate analysis using firms that remained private throughout as a benchmark. Finally, sales, capital expenditures, and other performance variables exhibit a consistently increasing pattern over the years before and after the IPO. The last two findings are consistent with the view that the widely documented post-IPO operating underperformance of firms is due to the real investment effects of going public rather than being due to earnings management immediately prior to the IPO.]
[We construct a comprehensive list of dual-class firms in the United States and use this list to analyze the relationship between insider ownership and firm value. Our data have two useful features. First, since dual-class stock separates cash-flow rights from voting rights, we can separately identify the impact of each. Second, we address endogeneity concerns by using exogenous predictors of dual-class status as instruments. In single-stage regressions, we find strong evidence that firm value is increasing in insiders' cash-flow rights and decreasing in insider voting rights. In instrumental variable regressions, the point estimates are similar but the significance levels are lower.]
[This article examines the issue of cross-sectional correlation in event studies. When there is event-date clustering, we find that even relatively low cross-correlation among abnormal returns is serious in terms of over-rejecting the null hypothesis of zero average abnormal returns. We propose a new test statistic that modifies the ¿ -statistic of Boehmer, Musumeci, and Poulsen (1991) to take into account cross-correlation and show that it performs well in competition with others, including the portfolio approach, which is less powerful than other alternatives under study. Also, our statistic is readily useable to test multiple-day cumulative abnormal returns.]
[We examine situations where the same fund manager simultaneously manages mutual funds and hedge funds. We refer to this as side-by-side management. We document 344 such cases involving 693 mutual funds and 538 hedge funds. Proponents of this practice argue that it is essential to hire and retain star performers. Detractors argue that the temptation for abuse is high, and the practice should be banned. Our analysis based on various performance metrics shows that side-by-side mutual fund managers significantly outperform peer funds, consistent with this privilege being granted primarily to star performers. Interestingly, side-by-side hedge fund managers are at best on par with their style category peers, casting further doubt on the idea that conflicts of interest undermine mutual fund investors. Thus, we find no evidence of welfare loss for mutual fund investors due to exploitation of conflicts of interest.]
[We argue that dividend stickiness, the tendency of managers to keep dividends unchanged, implies that managers use a partially pooling dividend policy. We offer a model that demonstrates how such a policy can evolve endogenously in equilibrium. An informed manager who cares about the firm's intrinsic value as well as short-term stock price allocates earnings between investments and dividends. We show that there is a continuum of equilibria in which the dividend is constant for a range of realized earnings. Compared with the standard separating equilibrium, this partial pooling behavior induces higher firm value and lower underinvestment. We offer new empirical implications relating the pooling nature of dividend stickiness to the information environment of the firm, dividend prediction models, managerial incentives, and investment.]
[We compare the trading performance of independent directors and other executives. The findings reveal that independent directors earn positive substantial abnormal returns when they purchase their company stock, and that the difference from the same firm's executives is relatively small at most horizons. We also find that executives and independent directors make higher returns in firms with the weakest governance, the gap between these two widens in such firms, and that independent directors sitting on the audit committee earn higher returns than other independent directors at the same firm. Independent directors also earn significantly abnormal returns when they sell the company stock in a window before bad news and around earnings restatements.]
[We exploit an unexpected inflow of liquidity in an emerging market to study how capital is intermediated to firms. We find that backward-looking credit limit constraints imposed by banks make it difficult for firms to borrow, despite readily available bank liquidity, healthy aggregate demand, and a sharply falling cost of capital. The resulting aggregate failure to extend and retain capital in the economy suggests that agency costs that force banks to rely on sticky balance-sheet-based credit limits prevent emerging economies from effectively intermediating capital.]
[The signing bonus is one of the most common elements of compensation packages for white-collar employees but has received little theoretical and empirical attention. This article investigates the use of a signing bonus as a tool for firms to signal to prospective employees: when they are uncertain regarding their fit with the firm, the signing bonus can serve as a credible signal of the firm's belief of said fit. The theory suggests that we should expect signing bonuses to be more common and larger when the economy is stronger, when employees are less certain of how well they will fit at the firm, when the quality of fit (known to the firm) is higher, and when performance pay is present. Employees receiving a signing bonus work harder, so the signing bonus also serves as an incentive device. This article also presents the first broad empirical look at the use of the signing bonus across industries and time. Evidence is consistent with the theory.]