Tighter bank lending standards could increase firms' post-hedging currency exposure by reducing firms' ability to fund hedging (funding channel) and/or by constraining counterparties' capacity to facilitate hedging (capacity channel). We find that tighter lending standards materially increase firms' exposure. In addition, we find no support for a funding-channel effect as firms' internal liquidity does not mitigate the impact of lending standards on exposure, indicating that the impact is through the capacity channel. Finally, we find a negative association between lending standards and aggregate transactions in currency derivatives, bolstering support for a capacity-channel effect. Our results have implications for firms' hedging policy and the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission.

We investigate the impact of debt covenants on acquisition characteristics. We find that acquirers with covenants pay lower merger premiums, make more focused acquisitions, and engage in acquisitions with higher synergy gains and higher acquirer returns around deal announcement, relative to those without. All these results are more pronounced with stricter debt covenants. Additionally, acquirers with covenants pay with a lower share fraction. In particular, capital covenants, which restrict debt issuance, are positively related to the share fraction, while performance covenants, which affect the stock of equity capital, result in a lower share fraction of payment. All our results hold only for acquirers who have not violated covenants, reemphasizing the importance of debt covenants and the threat they entail on corporate policies even before nearing violation states. Results also, generally, hold for badly governed firms, suggesting that creditors' monitoring role through debt covenants and borrower's effective corporate governance are substitutes.

Studying a comprehensive sample of stocks from the U.S. OTC market, we show that this market is a large and diverse trading environment with a rich set of regulatory and disclosure regimes, comprising venue rules and state laws beyond SEC regulation. We exploit this institutional richness to show that OTC firms subject to stricter regulatory regimes and disclosure requirements have higher market quality (higher liquidity and lower crash risk). Our analysis points to an important trade-off in regulating the OTC market and protecting investors: lowering regulatory requirements reduces the compliance burden for smaller firms, but it also reduces market quality.

Are standard structural models able to explain credit spreads on corporate bonds? In contrast to much of the literature, we find that the Black-Cox model matches the level of investment-grade spreads well. Model spreads for speculative-grade debt are too low, and we find that bond illiquidity contributes to this underpricing. Our analysis makes use of a new approach for calibrating the model to historical default rates that leads to more precise estimates of investment-grade default probabilities. Received October 25, 2016; editorial decision January 12, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

Recent research finds that analysts' cash flow forecasts have meaningful financial reporting ramifications, but, to date, the identified effects are unlikely to yield meaningful cash flow benefits. This study examines whether analysts' cash flow forecasts encourage managers to enhance the firm's cash flow position through tax avoidance activities. We evaluate the change in cash tax avoidance after analysts begin issuing cash flow forecasts relative to a propensity score matched control sample of firms without cash flow forecasts. Consistent with analysts' cash flow forecasts encouraging tax avoidance that enhances the firm's cash flow health, we find a negative association between cash tax payments and analysts' cash flow coverage. Additional analysis suggests this association is driven primarily by strategies to permanently avoid rather than to temporarily defer tax payments and that increased cash tax avoidance activity represents a nontrivial component of the overall increase in reported operating cash flows after the initiation of analysts' cash flow coverage.

Despite facing significant uncertainty about their lifespans and health care costs, most retirees do not buy annuities or long-term care insurance. In this paper, I find that retirees’ saving and insurance choices are highly inconsistent with standard life-cycle models in which people care only about their own consumption but match well models in which bequests are luxury goods. Bequest motives tend to reduce the value of insurance by reducing the opportunity cost of precautionary saving. The results suggest that bequest motives significantly increase saving and significantly decrease purchases of long-term care insurance and annuities.

In a comment, Okamoto (2018 ) identifies and corrects a misspecification of the rationing rule in Ausubel (2004 ). This reply elaborates on the observation that the optimality of truthful bidding in dynamic auctions may be sensitive to the fine details of the rationing rule. It then discusses the wider role of sequential bid processing in restoring truthful bidding.

After the public outcry over backdating, many firms began scheduling option grants. This eliminates backdating but creates other agency problems: Chief executive officers (CEOs) aware of upcoming option grants have an incentive to temporarily depress stock prices to obtain lower strike prices. We show that some CEOs have manipulated stock prices to increase option compensation, documenting negative abnormal returns before scheduled option grants and positive abnormal returns afterward. These returns are explained by measures of CEOs’ incentives and ability to influence stock prices. We document several mechanisms used to lower stock price, including changing the substance and timing of disclosures.