I present and estimate a dynamic model of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation and effort provision. I find that variation in CEO attributes explains the majority of variation in compensation (equity and total) but little of the variation in firm value. The primary drivers of cross-sectional compensation are risk aversion and influence on the board. Additionally, I estimate the magnitude of CEO agency issues. Removing CEO influence increases shareholder value in the typical firm by 1.74%, making CEOs risk neutral increases shareholder value by 16.12%, and removing all agency frictions increases shareholder value by 28.99%.

Between 2009 and 2014, 75% of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) were announced and issued overnight, compared to 27% between 2000 and 2008. Overnight issuers obtain a higher SEO offer price because they experience more favorable pre-offer returns. Consistent with these favorable returns being due to the avoidance of pre-issue selling pressure, non-overnight issuers experience a 2.5% pre-issue stock-price decline that reverses within 7 days. This post-issue reversal is increasing in SEO offer size and bigger following large pre-issue price declines. In contrast, returns following overnight offerings are less positive and unrelated to SEO offer size or pre-issue returns.

We identify forward-looking statements (FLS) in firms’ disclosures to distinguish between “forecast-like” (quantitative statements about earnings) and “other”, or non-forecast-like, FLS. We show that, like earnings forecasts, other FLS generate significant investor and analyst responses. Unlike earnings forecasts, other FLS are issued more frequently when uncertainty is higher. We then show that earnings-related FLS are more sensitive to uncertainty than quantitative statements, suggesting that managers are more likely to alter the content than the form of FLS when uncertainty is higher. Our study indicates that incorporating other FLS into empirical measures provides a more comprehensive proxy for firms’ voluntary disclosures.

I provide evidence of a new mechanism by which access to public securities mitigates the bank hold-up problem and reduces loan spreads – it increases a borrower's bargaining power vis-à-vis a lender by offering a bank loan substitute. Difference-in-differences results indicate that loan spreads decline following legislation that makes public securities more attractive, but only when public securities represent a credible substitute for the bank loan (i.e., for term loans taken out by credit rated borrowers). Spreads on revolving lines of credit, which are more complementary with public securities, increase.

We study time-series and cross-firm variation in corporate cash holdings from 1920 to 2014. The recent increase in cash is not unique in magnitude. However, the recent divergence between average and aggregate cash is new and entirely driven by a shift in cash policies of newly public firms, whereas within-firm changes have been negative or flat since the 1940s. Cross-sectional relations between cash holdings and firm characteristics are stable throughout the century, though characteristics explain little of the trends in aggregate cash. Macroeconomic conditions, corporate profitability and investment, and (since 2000) repatriation taxes explain aggregate cash over the last century. Received August 23, 2017; editorial decision April 28, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

The JOBS Act allows certain analysts to be more involved in the IPO process, but does not relax restrictions on analyst compensation structure. We find that these analysts initiate coverage that is more optimistically biased, less accurate, and generates smaller stock market reactions. Investors purchasing shares following these initiations lose over 3% of their investment by the firm's subsequent earnings release. By contrast, issuers, analysts, and investment banks appear to benefit from this increased bias, as optimism is more positively associated with proxies for firm visibility and investment banking revenues when analysts are involved in the IPO process.