By using an existing and a new convergence measure, this paper assesses whether bank loan and bond interest rates are converging for the non-financial corporate sector across the euro area. Whilst we find evidence for complete bond market integration, the market for bank loans remains segmented, albeit to various degrees depending on the type and size of the loan. Factor analysis reveals that rates on large loans and small loans with long rate fixation periods have weakly converged in the sense that, up to a fixed effect, their evolution is driven by common factors only. In contrast, the price evolution of small loans with short rate fixation periods is still affected by country-specific dynamic factors. There are few signs that bank loan rates are becoming more uniform with time.

ABSTRACT: This study investigates the spread of aggressive corporate tax reporting by modeling a firm’s decision to adopt the corporate-owned life insurance (COLI) shelter. Prior studies identify firm characteristics associated with aggressive tax reporting (Desai and Dharmapala 2006; Frank et al. 2009) and tax shelter participation (Wilson 2009; Lisowsky 2010). This study examines whether social environment factors explain the pattern of tax shelter adoption. Building on theory related to the diffusion of innovations and institutional isomorphism, I hypothesize direct and indirect ties between prior and potential shelter adopters influence the spread of shelter use. I find that network ties via board interlocks increase the likelihood of adopting the COLI shelter. I also find weak evidence that COLI use spreads geographically. However, I find no evidence that the spread of COLI use is concentrated among a particular set of audit firms or industries.

ABSTRACT We examine the relation between disclosure tone and shareholder litigation to determine whether managers' use of optimistic language increases litigation risk. Using both general-purpose and context-specific text dictionaries to quantify tone, we find that plaintiffs target more optimistic statements in their lawsuits and that sued firms' earnings announcements are unusually optimistic relative to other firms experiencing similar economic circumstances. These findings are consistent with optimistic language increasing litigation risk. In addition, we find incrementally greater litigation risk when managers are both unusually optimistic and engage in abnormal selling. This finding suggests that firms can mitigate litigation risk by ensuring that optimistic statements are not contradicted by insider selling. Finally, we find that insider selling is associated with litigation risk only when contemporaneous disclosures are unusually optimistic. JEL Classifications: G38; K22; M41; M48. Data Availability: Data are available from sources indicated in the text.

Recent papers have debated whether the negative correlation between measures of firm asset growth and subsequent returns is of little importance since it applies only to small firms, is justified as compensation for risk, or is evidence of mispricing. We show that the asset growth effect is pervasive, and evidence to the contrary arises due to specification choices; that one measure of asset growth, the change in total assets, largely subsumes the explanatory power of other measures; that the ability of asset growth to explain either the cross section of returns or the time series of factor loadings is linked to firm idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL); that the return effect is concentrated around earnings announcements; and that analyst forecasts are systematically higher than realized earnings for faster growing firms. In general, there appears to be no asset growth effect in firms with low IVOL. Our findings are consistent with a mispricing-based explanation for the asset growth effect in which arbitrage costs allow the effect to persist.

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.

We estimate an equilibrium model of dynamic oligopoly with durable goods and endogenous innovation to examine the effect of competition on innovation in the personal computer microprocessor industry. Firms make dynamic pricing and investment decisions while consumers make dynamic upgrade decisions, anticipating product improvements and price declines. Consistent with Schumpeter, we find that the rate of innovation in product quality would be 4.2 percent higher without AMD present, though higher prices would reduce consumer surplus by $12 billion per year. Comparative statics illustrate the role of product durability and provide implications of the model for other industries.

Unscheduled stock options to target chief executive officers (CEOs) are a nontrivial phenomenon during private merger negotiations. In 920 acquisition bids during 1999–2007, over 13% of targets grant them. These options substitute for golden parachutes and compensate target CEOs for the benefits they forfeit because of the merger. Targets granting unscheduled options are more likely to be acquired but they earn lower premiums. Consequently, deal value drops by $62 for every dollar target CEOs receive from unscheduled options. Conversely, acquirers of targets offering these awards experience higher returns. Therefore, deals involving unscheduled grants exhibit a transfer of wealth from target shareholders to bidder shareholders.

We study the price-setting problem of a firm in the presence of both observation and menu costs. The firm optimally decides when to “review” costly information on the adequacy of its price. Upon each review, the firm chooses whether to adjust its price, one or more times, before the next price review. Each price adjustment entails paying a menu cost. The firm's choices map into several statistics: the frequency of price reviews, the frequency of price adjustments, the size distribution of price changes, and the hazard rate of price adjustments. The simultaneous presence of observation and menu costs produces complementarities that change the predictions of simpler models featuring one cost only. For instance, infrequent observations may reflect a high menu cost rather than high observation costs: in spite of these complementarities, we show that the ratio of the two costs is identified by several statistics on price observations and adjustments.

While cumulative knowledge production is central to growth, little empirical research investigates how institutions shape whether existing knowledge can be exploited to create new knowledge. This paper assesses the impact of a specific institution, a biological resource center, whose objective is to certify and disseminate knowledge. We disentangle the marginal impact of this institution on cumulative research from the impact of selection, in which the most important discoveries are endogenously linked to research-enhancing institutions. Exploiting exogenous shifts of biomaterials across institutional settings and employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that effective institutions amplify the cumulative impact of individual scientific discoveries. (JEL D02, D83, I23, O30)