Antitrust laws mandate review of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) that exceed an asset size threshold based on accounting standards that exclude most intangible capital. We show that this exclusion leads to thousands of intangible‐intensive M&As being nonreportable. Acquirers in nonreportable deals achieve higher equity values and price markups, especially when consolidating product markets. Furthermore, nonreportable pharmaceutical deals are three times more likely to involve overlapping drug projects, which are subsequently 40% more likely to be terminated. Our results suggest that the growth of intangible assets may exacerbate market power through nonreportable consolidation of the sectors most concerning for consumers.

We estimate the indirect costs of corporate bankruptcy associated with lost customers. In incentivized experiments, randomly informing consumers about a firm's Chapter 11 reorganization lowers their willingness to pay for the firm's products by 17% to 28%. Consumers worry that bankruptcy could reduce product quality or prevent future interactions with the bankrupt firm. On average, 38% of consumers are aware of major bankruptcies. Using our experiments to estimate a structural model, we show that these indirect costs of bankruptcy amount to 12% to 15% of a firm's value. We show that these costs are unlikely to arise before bankruptcy.

Mergers of firms that share labor markets increase labor market concentration which can lead to labor efficiency gains and/or create labor market power for the merged firms. Using a novel measure based on establishment‐level employment data, we find that merger‐induced increases in labor market concentration explain value creation in a sample of completed U.S. public firm mergers from 1991 to 2016. Analysis of the stock market reactions of rival, supplier, and customer firms, as well as firm‐ and establishment‐level real effects in the merging firms, supports a labor efficiency explanation of these merger gains.

Combining a randomized controlled trial with administrative and survey data, this paper shows that credit limit extensions significantly increase total spending and income expectations. By controlling for changes in personal income expectations, the spending response to credit limit extensions weakens by approximately 30%. For financially unconstrained consumers, expectation changes account for around two‐thirds of the spending responses to limit extensions. These findings are consistent with consumers inferring future income from credit supply.

Using granular data covering both regulated (brokerage‐financed) and unregulated (shadow‐financed) margin accounts in China, we provide novel evidence on retail investors' margin trading behavior and its price implications. We first show that retail investors' decisions to lever up in stock trading despite the hefty borrowing cost is related to their lottery preferences. We then show that margin borrowing affects investors' trading behavior—investors are more likely to liquidate their holdings as they approach margin calls. Finally, we show that margin‐induced trading aggregates to affect asset prices and contributes to shock spillovers across stocks (e.g., from lottery stocks to nonlottery stocks).

We exploit an episode of plausibly random debt discharge due to the loss of paperwork for thousands of defaulted borrowers to examine the effects of private student debt relief on borrower outcomes. We find that borrowers who receive debt relief (treated) experience declines in debt balances and delinquency rates on other accounts, and increases in mobility and income relative to those who bear the costs of default like wage garnishment and collections (control). Borrowers in both groups contribute to our findings through different mechanisms. While our estimates may not directly apply to blanket student loan forgiveness, they speak to the benefits of forgiveness in reducing the consequences of debt burden for distressed borrowers.

The annual proportion of U.S. public firms that reported a financial covenant violation fell roughly 70% between 1997 and 2019. To understand this trend, we develop an estimable model of covenant design that depends on the ability to differentiate between distressed and nondistressed borrowers and the relative costs associated with screening incorrectly. We find that the drop in violations is best explained by an increased willingness to forgo early detection of distressed borrowers in exchange for fewer inconsequential violations, which we attribute largely to a shift in the composition of public borrowers and partly to heightened investor sentiment during the 2010s.

Green finance—including environmental, social, and governance investing and sustainable finance regulations—is widespread, but can it substitute for carbon pricing in fighting climate change? In a unified model, I show that (i) when carbon prices reflect the social cost of carbon, green finance should not be used; (ii) when carbon prices are too low, green finance can implement the social optimum if each firm's cost of capital can be set to its sustainable discount rate , which increases with the ratio of carbon emissions to firm value. I provide calibrations, analyze stranded assets, and present implementations through subsidies or preferential financing for green firms.

Growing discussions of impact investing and stakeholder capitalism have increased interest in measuring companies' social impact. We conceptualize corporate social impact as the welfare loss that would be caused by a firm's exit. To illustrate, we quantify the social impacts of 74 firms in 12 industries using a new survey measuring consumer and worker substitution patterns combined with models of product and labor markets. We find that consumer surplus is the primary component of social impact, suggesting that consumer impacts deserve more attention from impact investors. Existing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and social impact ratings are essentially unrelated to our economically grounded measures.

Cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) computed around acquisition announcements are widely considered to be market‐based assessments of expected value creation. We show, however, that announcement returns do not correlate with commonly used and new measures of ex post outcomes. A simple characteristics‐based model using standard information known at the announcement date can predict these outcomes reasonably well, yet CAR even fails to capture the predictions from this model. Evidence suggests that information about the stand‐alone acquirer dominates CAR, making it virtually impossible to extract deal‐related information. We conclude that CAR is an unreliable measure of expected value creation.