We examine whether resource adjustment costs, such as installation and disposal costs for fixed assets, or hiring and firing costs for employees, impede value creation in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We focus on M&A deals because they are major corporate investment decisions. As a proxy for adjustment costs, we use a firm‐level measure of cost stickiness. We predict that acquirers with high adjustment costs have less flexibility in restructuring resources following the acquisition and will find it more costly to merge the target firm's operations. Consistent with this prediction, we find that the acquirer's adjustment costs are negatively associated with abnormal returns around the acquisition announcement. Additionally, adjustment costs are also negatively associated with deal synergies. Relatedly, we find that acquirers with high adjustment costs purchase targets with high adjustment costs. In accordance with this finding, we show that acquirers with high adjustment costs purchase intangible‐intensive targets. Collectively, our results highlight the important implication of adjustment costs in M&A deals for managers and capital market participants.

This paper employs the firm life‐cycle concept to extend our understanding of the mispricing of accrual and cash flow information by the stock market. We find that accruals and free cash flows are strongly (negatively) correlated in the maturity and decline stages of a firm's life cycle but not in the growth stage, suggesting that they capture unique information in the growth stage of the firm's life cycle but more correlated information in the later stages. Consistent with this finding, we show that the cash flows anomaly subsumes the accruals anomaly in maturity and decline stages, but not in the growth stage. Our findings contribute to the debate regarding the overlap between the two anomalies.

In December 2006, the SEC issued new rules requiring enhanced disclosure by public U.S. firms of perquisites granted to their executives. The rules applied to perquisites granted in fiscal year 2006 and thereafter. Because the rules were implemented quickly, the perks disclosed for 2006 reflect the arrangements firms made under prior disclosure rules: firms could not revise perks to reflect the new rules until 2007. For firms that disclose for the first time in 2006, we predict and find that perks decrease in 2007, reflecting both the costs of increased disclosure and enhanced monitoring. This decrease in perks is offset by higher levels of non‐perk compensation, however. We also predict and find that the effect of perk disclosure by formerly non‐disclosing firms in 2006 leads to higher perks in 2007 for firms that were disclosing perks prior to the rule change.

We examine whether aggregate cost stickiness predicts future macro-level unemployment rate. We incorporate aggregate cost stickiness into three different classes of forecasting models studied in prior literature, and demonstrate an improvement in forecasting performance for all three models. For example, when adding cost stickiness to an OLS regression that includes a battery of macroeconomic indicators and control variables, we find that a one-standard-deviation-higher cost stickiness in recent quarters is followed by a 0.23 to 0.26 percentage point lower unemployment rate in the current and following quarter. In out-of-sample tests, we find significant reductions in the root mean squared errors upon incorporation of cost stickiness for all three models. Additional tests suggest that professional macro forecasters, particularly those employed in nonfinancial industries, do not fully incorporate the information contained in cost stickiness. Finally, we find a stronger predictive power of cost stickiness toward the end of recessionary periods; we also assess cross-sectional variation of this predictive ability.

We examine how firms’ contractual relationships with their employees affect the design of their debt contracts, and the use of financial covenants in particular. Viewing the firm as the nexus of both explicit and implicit contractual relationships, we argue that managers cater to their employees’ preferences when negotiating contractual terms with creditors. We argue that an increase in unemployment-insurance benefits reduces employees’ cost of job loss, which, in turn, allows managers to take more risk. First, we show that more generous benefits are associated with a higher operating leverage, operating cash flow volatility, and product-development frequency. We then find that loans initiated following an increase in unemployment-insurance benefits include a higher proportion of performance, rather than capital covenants. Overall, our study demonstrates how the design of debt contracts changes in response to arguably exogenous changes in employees’ collective tolerance—and, in turn, managers’ preferences—for risk.

We provide evidence that credit investors do not fully impound the implications of firms' cost structure (or operating leverage) when pricing credit default swaps. Information about firms' cost structure is not disclosed and needs to be estimated. Furthermore, the performance implications of firms' cost structure depend on the expected macroeconomic conditions. We focus on the debt market because of the strong emphasis of this market on downside risk. To measure expected aggregate macroeconomic conditions, we employ the change in the anxious index (AI), which is the probability of a decline in real GDP provided by the SPF—the survey of professional forecasters. We find that the interaction between the firm's cost structure and change in AI predicts one-quarter-ahead CDS spreads. Portfolio-level analysis confirms this result.