The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between strategic alliances and the cost of debt, proxied by the at-issue yield spread of bond offerings. We hypothesize that the participation of strategic alliances lowers a firm’s cost of debt because it improves the level and stability of future profit streams and reduces information asymmetry among investors. Based on 2150 bond-issuing firms during the period 1985–2009, we find evidence consistent with this argument. Furthermore, we find that the mitigating effect of strategic alliances on the debt cost is much more pronounced for firms with higher product market competition, more severe financial constraints, and greater R&D investments. Taken together, this is the first paper to examine the importance of strategic alliances in the bond market and our results highlight that corporate alliance activity is valued outside the equity market and creates additional benefits that result in lower cost of debt financing.

This paper examines the profits of revenue, earnings, and price momentum strategies in an attempt to understand investor reactions when facing multiple information of firm performance in various scenarios. We first offer evidence that there is no dominating momentum strategy among the revenue, earnings, and price momentums, suggesting that revenue surprises, earnings surprises, and prior returns each carry some exclusive unpriced information content. We next show that the profits of momentum driven by firm fundamental performance information (revenue or earnings) depend upon the accompanying firm market performance information (price), and vice versa. The robust monotonicity in multivariate momentum returns is consistent with the argument that the market does not only underestimate the individual information but also the joint implications of multiple information on firm performance, particularly when they point in the same direction. A three-way combined momentum strategy may offer monthly return as high as 1.44%. The information conveyed by revenue surprises and earnings surprises combined account for about 19% of price momentum effects, which finding adds to the large literature on tracing the sources of price momentum.