This paper investigates whether leveraged buyouts (LBOs) increase the bargaining power of firms with their suppliers. We find that suppliers to LBO firms experience significantly negative abnormal returns at the announcements of downstream LBOs. We also find that suppliers who have likely made substantial relationship-specific investments are more negatively affected, both in terms of abnormal stock returns and reduced profit margins, than suppliers of commodity products or transitory suppliers. Interestingly, leveraged recapitalization announcements are not associated with negative returns to suppliers, suggesting that increased leverage without an accompanying change in organizational form does not, on average, lead to price concessions from suppliers.

[We find a significant positive relation between a firm's advertising spending in the United States and its contemporaneous foreign cash flow. This relation holds even after controlling for factors that should be related to the optimal level of domestic advertising, and it is stronger for subsets of firms that we expect to be relatively more financially constrained. Our evidence supports the hypothesis that there is a causal and economically substantial link between cash flow and investment spending, even for intangible investments such as advertising. Our evidence also suggests that firms have active internal capital markets in which capital is moved across geographic regions.]

We find a significant positive relation between a firm's advertising spending in the United States and its contemporaneous foreign cash flow. This relation holds even after controlling for factors that should be related to the optimal level of domestic advertising, and it is stronger for subsets of firms that we expect to be relatively more financially constrained. Our evidence supports the hypothesis that there is a causal and economically substantial link between cash flow and investment spending, even for intangible investments such as advertising. Our evidence also suggests that firms have active internal capital markets in which capital is moved across geographic regions. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

ABSTRACT: We study turnover and promotions of division managers in multidivisional firms. Turnover is negatively related to divisional accounting performance, positively related to industry performance, but not significantly related to firm performance or the performance of other divisions. Consistent with tournament theory, promotions are significantly related to whether one division is performing better than others, but are not significantly related to the magnitude of any performance difference. A simple performance metric, divisional ROA, appears more closely related to job allocation decisions than several alternatives. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that accounting information is used by firms when evaluating managerial personnel.