Because of changes in tax regulations and increased political pressure, firms are reconsidering their practices of shifting manufacturing operations offshore to lower wage countries. Although outsourcing has been well researched, few studies examine managerial practices that influence offshore operations. We investigate the effects of choices regarding labor, suppliers, and outsourcing that influence firm longevity in the maquiladora industry in Mexico. We argue that firms are exposed to labor frictions, supply-chain constraints, and compliance and regulatory risks that if left unresolved can lead to plant closure attributable to labor or regulatory frictions and rising costs. We consider specific actions pursued by managers at maquiladora plants to mitigate the underlying constraints and then analyze factors that affect the likelihood of continuing operations, that is, the longevity of the plants. We find a positive relation between the likelihood of longevity in operations and the following plant characteristics: hourly wages, workforce stability, skill, and the decision to outsource regulatory compliance functions. We document a negative relation between longevity and total labor cost as a percent of total costs as well as using suppliers based in Mexico. We also find that high-tech plants have higher stability, pay higher wages, and experience greater longevity than low-tech plants. Overall, we identify key managerial choices that are related to longevity in offshoring production.

We consider a dynamic model in which receiving support from the lender of last resort (LLR) may help banks to weather investor runs. We show the need for regulatory liquidity standards when the underlying social trade-offs make the uninformed LLR inclined to support troubled banks during a run. Liquidity standards increase the time available before the LLR must decide on supporting the bank. This facilitates the arrival of information on the bank’s financial condition and improves the efficiency of the decision taken by the LLR, a role that can be modified but not replaced with the use of capital regulation.

This paper studies how the durability of assets affects financing. We show that more durable assets require larger down payments making them harder to finance, because durability affects the price of assets and hence the overall financing need more than their collateral value. Durability affects technology adoption, the choice between new and used capital, and the rent versus buy decision. Constrained firms invest in less durable assets and buy used assets. More durable assets are more likely to be rented. Economies with weak legal enforcement invest more in less durable, otherwise dominated assets and are net importers of used assets.

Many studies report that the size effect in the cross-section of stock returns disappeared after the early 1980s. This paper shows that its disappearance can be attributed to negative shocks to the profitability of small firms and positive shocks to big firms. After adjusting for the price impact of profitability shocks, we find a robust size effect in the cross-section of expected returns after the early 1980s. Our results highlight the importance of in-sample cash-flow shocks in understanding cross-sectional return predictability.Received April 2, 2014; editorial decision August 6, 2018 by Editor Laura Starks.

Concerns are commonly raised that strong public unions extract generous pension benefits from state governments and are the cause of states' burdensome pension obligations. Prior research (Anzia and Moe 2015) finds evidence supporting such concerns. Consistent with incentives to minimize such perceptions, our findings suggest that state pension plans with stronger public unions select higher discount rates to improve reported funding levels. While riskier asset allocations are used to support the higher discount rates (which equal the expected return on the plan assets), most of the higher rates appear opportunistic. In addition, consistent with a desire to avoid drawing attention to persistent plan underfunding, our evidence indicates that stronger union plans are less likely to select longer amortization periods to recognize pension deficits when underfunding is larger. We do not, however, find evidence for asset smoothing periods being used to delay the recognition of investment losses on plan assets. Together, our findings suggest that stronger union plans take steps to make their pension obligations look less burdensome to the public.

We examine whether a firm's strategic priorities influence its selection of a new CEO and what conditions enable such an appointment to add value to the firm. More specifically, this study investigates the value‐adding effect when prospector firms (i.e., those pursuing a prospector‐type strategy) select a CEO with high social capital. We argue that uncertainty, driven by a firm's strategy, will determine the decision to select a CEO with high social capital; such CEOs can use their networks to mitigate the uncertainty and thus can be valuable to the firm. However, prior research indicates that CEOs with high social capital can engage in behavior detrimental to firm value. To mitigate the potential for this to occur, we assess whether corporate governance can play a role in prospector firms who appoint CEOs with high social capital. Drawing on archival data of CEO successions over a 14‐year period, we find that prospector firms have greater incentives to appoint CEOs with high social capital. We also find that prospector firms who appoint a CEO with high social capital improve their performance. Furthermore, the value‐adding effect of this selection choice is stronger in prospector firms with good corporate governance.

We document that international input-output linkages contribute substantially to synchronizing producer price inflation (PPI) across countries. Using a multicountry, industry-level data set that combines information on PPI and exchange rates with global input-output linkages, we recover the underlying cost shocks that are propagated internationally via the global input-output network, thus generating the observed dynamics of PPI. We then compare the extent to which common global factors account for the variation in actual PPI and in the underlying cost shocks. Across a range of econometric tests, input-output linkages account for half of the global component of PPI inflation.

This study examines the relation between bank equity ownership and corporate hedging in Japan, an economy where banks are allowed, to a certain limit, to hold shares of firms to which they lend funds. The results show that bank equity ownership is positively related to the corporate usage of derivatives. We also find very little evidence that firm-level financial constraints affect derivatives usage. We further analyze the relation between derivatives usage and firm value to assess whether derivatives usage is driven by bank rent-seeking or speculative behavior. We find that derivatives usage is positively related to firm value providing support to the notion that bank equity ownership increases corporate hedging which, in turn, leads to high firm valuation. Robustness tests show that the relation between hedging and main bank equity ownership is not driven by endogeneity. In the end, our findings suggest that corporate hedging is driven by risk-averse incentives resulting from bank monitoring. We conclude that, in addition to relevant economic factors, ownership structure can also affect corporate hedging behavior.

We extend the domain of liability of foreignness (LOF) research to capital markets and evaluate whether firms incur LOF when attempting to raise debt capital abroad. We rely upon multiple conceptualizations of institutional distance to capture the extent to which distance may contribute to LOF in capital markets. Based on a sample of 361 firms from 45 countries over a 24year time period, we find that institutional distances lead to increased cost of debt. More importantly, we find that frequency of foreign bond issuance helps to mitigate the LOF. We conclude with a discussion of our results and their implications for future research on understanding how firms address LOF when sourcing debt abroad.

Regulation requires auditors to raise significant audit issues and concerns to the attention of audit engagement leadership and requires leadership to encourage such communication. This research demonstrates, using an experiment and a survey, that audit team members' willingness to speak up about such issues is associated with their intrinsic motivational orientation. Based on this result, we test whether audit leadership can leverage this relationship to increase speaking up, particularly when audit issues are more ambiguous, by emphasizing intrinsic goals. Results across three additional experiments indicate that auditors whose leaders emphasize intrinsic goals, whether directly or through tone at the top and firm culture, are more likely to speak up than are other auditors. We also find that auditors are more likely to speak up when an audit issue is less versus more ambiguous. We conclude that leadership can fulfill their obligation to encourage upward communication by emphasizing intrinsic versus extrinsic goals, regardless of the level of ambiguity surrounding the audit issue.