Although a number of prior papers have argued the benefits to foreign firms of cross‐listing their shares in the U.S., the number of foreign firms exiting U.S. capital markets has been increasing. This has occurred despite the difficulties foreign firms face in deregistering from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This paper examines the reasons underlying this trend. One of our main findings is that the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act has reduced the net benefits of a U.S. listing and registration, particularly for smaller foreign firms with lower trading volume and stronger insider control.

We employ textual analysis to identify mergers and acquisitions (M&As) financed by corporate loans and show that acquirer announcement returns are higher in loan-financed M&As. Utilizing an instrumental variable approach and a quasi-natural experiment, we provide evidence that lenders contribute to the higher acquirer returns in loan-financed M&As. Our findings support the view that lenders differ in their ability to screen and monitor borrowers and that their ability is persistent. We also find evidence that lenders’ participation in the M&A market can resolve uncertainty about M&A deal quality, improve corporate governance by preventing value-destroying M&As, and provide long-term monitoring benefits to acquirer shareholders.

This paper investigates an important contemporary issue relating to the involvement of hedge funds in the syndicated loan market. In particular, we investigate the potential conflicts of interest that arise when hedge funds make syndicated loans and take short positions in the equity of borrowing firms. We find evidence consistent with the short-selling of the equity of the hedge fund borrowers prior to public announcements of both loan originations and loan amendments. We also find that hedge funds are more likely to lend to highly leveraged, lower credit quality firms, where access to private information is potentially the most valuable and where trading on such information could lead to enhanced profits. Overall, our results have important implications for the current debate regarding regulating the hedge fund industry.

We exploit Donald Trump’s nonpolitical background and surprise election victory to identify the value of sudden presidential ties among S&P 500 firms. In our setting firms did not choose to become politically connected, so we identify treatment effects comparatively free of selection bias prevalent in this literature. Firms with presidential ties enjoyed greater abnormal returns around the 2016 election. Since Trump’s inauguration, connected firms had better performance, received more government contracts, and were less subject to unfavorable regulatory actions. We rule out a number of confounding factors, including industry designation, sensitivity to Republican platforms, campaign finance, and lobbying expenditures.