Corporate finance researchers have long been puzzled by low corporate debt ratios given debt's corporate tax advantage. This article recognizes that firm value typically reflects a growing stream of earnings, while current debt reflects a nongrowing stream of interest payments. Debt to value is therefore a distorted measure of corporate tax shielding. Even with very small debt-related costs, this may explain the observed magnitude and cross-sectional variation of debt ratios. Since this variation may be independent of tax shielding, debt ratios provide an inappropriate framework for empirically examining the trade-off theory of capital structure.

[Corporate finance researchers have long been puzzled by low corporate debt ratios given debt's corporate tax advantage. This article recognizes that firm value typically reflects a growing stream of earnings, while current debt reflects a nongrowing stream of interest payments. Debt to value is therefore a distorted measure of corporate tax shielding. Even with very small debt-related costs, this may explain the observed magnitude and cross-sectional variation of debt ratios. Since this variation may be independent of tax shielding, debt ratios provide an inappropriate framework for empirically examining the trade-off theory of capital structure.]

[We present a model of corporate acquisitions in which initially uninformed bidders must incur costs to learn their (independent) valuations of a potential takeover target. The first bidder makes either a preemptive bid that will deter the second bidder from investigating or a lower bid that will induce the second bidder to investigate and possibly compete. We show that the expected price of the target may be higher when the first bidder makes a deterring bid than when there is competitive bidding. Hence, by weakening the first bidder's incentive to choose a preemptive bid, regulatory and management policies to assist competing bidders may reduce both the expected takeover price and social welfare.]

Abstract Rule 10b5-1 enables insiders to preplan future trades before becoming informed. Within a strategic rational expectations equilibrium framework, I characterize an insider’s unique optimal trading plan, which balances portfolio diversification against exploitation of the rule’s selective termination option. Because the rule reduces adverse selection and provides insurance against bad outcomes, the rule generally improves welfare for both the insider, who later becomes informed, and uninformed outsiders, provided there exists a sufficient degree of information asymmetry. Eliminating the rule’s selective termination option results in an even greater welfare improvement under a large subset of parametric conditions. Received March 9, 2018; editorial decision January 11, 2019 by Editor Wei Jiang.

Using an unexpected government regulation that restricted the ability of micro-finance institutions to recover loans in one Indian state, we examine whether this intervention impacted bank loan performance. The bank loan delinquency rate increased significantly as a result. In response, the ex-post bank credit supply declined by more than half. For identification, we compare loans from branches located in regions subject to this intervention with loans from nearby branches of the same bank located in regions not subject to the intervention. We conclude that political interventions in credit markets could have significant spillover effects.

This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high-cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2007. Controlling for credit score and other risk factors, AfricanAmerican and Hispanic borrowers are 103% and 78% more likely to receive high-cost mortgages for home purchases. Alarge part of the increase is attributable to sorting across lenders (55%-65%), and this, in turn, can be largely accounted for by the lender’s ex post foreclosure risk. The remaining within-lender differences are also concentrated in high-risk lenders, revealing the central role of these institutions in explaining market-wide racial and ethnic differences.

We document that announcement-period abnormal returns of sovereign wealth fund (SWF) equity investments in publicly traded firms are positive but lower than those of comparable private investments. Further, SWF investment targets suffer from declining return on assets and sales growth over the following three years. Our results are robust to controls for target and deal characteristics and are not driven by SWF target selection criteria. Larger discounts are associated with SWFs taking seats on boards of directors and with SWFs under strict government control acquiring greater stakes, supporting the hypothesis that political influence negatively affects firm value and performance.

Using a strategic rational expectations equilibrium framework, we show that forcing a well-informed insider to disclose her trades in advance tends to increase welfare for both the insider and less-informed outsiders. Advance disclosure generates price risk for the insider, and to mitigate this risk, the insider trades less aggressively on her private information. Consequently, outsiders face lower adverse selection costs, which improves risk sharing and increases welfare. The drop in trading aggressiveness also causes market efficiency to decline. Furthermore, pretrade disclosure encourages excessive risk taking but may either encourage or discourage managerial effort.

This article establishes a role for corporate governance regulation. An externality operating through executive compensation motivates regulation. Governance lowers agency costs, allowing firms to grant less incentive pay. When a firm increases governance and lowers incentive pay, other firms can also lower executive compensation. Because firms do not internalize the full benefit of governance, regulation can improve investor welfare. When regulation is enforced, large firms increase in value, small firms decrease in value, and all firms lower incentive pay. Distinct cross-sectional and cross-country predictions for the number of voluntary governance firms are provided. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

[We analyze complex bond portfolios within the framework of a dynamic general equilibrium asset-pricing model. Equilibrium bond portfolios are nonsensical and imply a trading volume that vastly exceeds observed trading volume on financial markets. Instead, portfolios that combine bond ladders with a market portfolio of equity assets are nearly optimal investment strategies. The welfare loss of these simple investment strategies, when compared to the equilibrium portfolio, converges to zero as the length of the bond ladder increases. This article, therefore, provides a rationale for naming bond ladders as a popular bond investment strategy.]