Does more leverage always worsen the debt agency problem? This paper presents a unified analysis that accounts for both risk-shifting and under-investment debt agency problems. For firms with positive marginal volatility of investment (defined as the change in cash flow volatility corresponding to a change of investment scale), equity holders' risk-shifting incentive will mitigate the under-investment problem. This implies that, contrary to conventional views, the total agency cost of debt does not uniformly increase with leverage. This model further predicts that, for high growth firms in which the under-investment problem is severe, the optimal debt ratio is positively related to the marginal volatility of investment. Empirical results support this prediction.

We investigate how chief executive officers’ (CEOs) risk incentive (VEGA) affects firm innovation. To establish causality, we exploit compensation changes instigated by the FAS 123R accounting regulation in 2005 that mandated stock option expensing at fair values. Our identification tests indicate a positive and causal effect of CEOs’ VEGA on innovation activities. Furthermore, dampened managerial risk-taking incentive after the implementation of FAS 123R leads to a significant reduction in innovation related to firms’ core business and explorative inventions. It implies that managers diversify their innovation portfolios and decrease explorative inventions to curtail business risk when their risk-taking incentive is reduced.

This paper studies the political incentive of public pension funds in shareholder activism. Using a sample of shareholder proposals from 1993 to 2013 and a hand-collected data set of the political variables of public pension funds, we document evidence consistent with the “political attention hypothesis.” We find that the number of politicians on public pension fund boards is significantly positively related to the frequency with which portfolio firms are targeted. Moreover, the frequency of social-responsibility proposals by public pension funds increases significantly, as the funds have a greater number of board members running for election to public office. However the frequency of corporate governance proposals is not related to the number of board members running for elections to public office. Furthermore, we document that political connection between a portfolio firm and a public pension fund mitigates the firm’s likelihood of being targeted by the fund with social-responsibility proposals. This result supports the “political contribution hypothesis.” The paper provides direct evidence that public pension-fund board members employ shareholder proposals to enhance their political capital.

We develop a simply theory on interest rate swaps based on the difference between bank loans and public debts. While restrictive covenants of bank loans help reduce agency costs, banks also have natural disadvantages in bearing interest rate risk due to their floating liabilities. A firm that wants a fixed-rate loan can borrow a floating-rate loan from a bank and enter an interest rate swap to hedge the interest rate risk. Consistent with our theory, we find empirically that fixed-rate swap payers generally have lower credit ratings, higher leverage ratios, higher percentages of long-term floating-rate loans, and are more likely to use bank loans than floating-rate swap payers.

This paper analyzes a firm's dynamic decisions: i) whether to issue a callable or non-callable bond; ii) when to call the callable bond; and iii) whether to refund it when it is called. We argue that a firm uses a callable bond to reduce the risk-shifting problem in case its investment opportunities become poor. Our empirical findings support this argument. We find that a firm facing poorer future investment opportunities is more likely to issue a callable bond than a firm facing better investment opportunities. In addition, a firm with a higher leverage ratio and higher investment risk is more likely to issue a callable bond. Finally, after a callable bond is issued, a firm with a poor performance and a low investment activity tends to call back a bond without refunding; a firm with the best performance and highest investment activity tends to call back a bond and refund its call; and a firm with mediocre performance and investment activity tends to not call its bonds.

Debt covenant violation alters firm dynamics, providing creditors with the right to demand repayment, and via that right, influence firm actions. We provide evidence consistent with creditors employing that channel to influence CEO compensation. Using regression discontinuity analysis, we show that in the year after a covenant violation, after controlling for other factors, CEO compensation is 8.5 percent lower and the CEO's compensation package contains fewer risk-taking incentives, as the vega associated with newly granted options is 26 percent lower. These changes are more pronounced when the creditor has greater influence, such as when the borrower and creditor have a prior lending relationship, the creditor is a highly reputable bank, or when the borrower is financially weaker. We also find that CEOs' risk-taking incentives decrease with the number of debt covenants; in particular, the number of performance debt covenants being breached.

By integrating staggered interstate banking deregulation into a gravity model following Goetz, Laeven, and Levine (2013), (2016), we construct a time-varying, bank-specific instrument for geographic diversification and investigate its causal effect on corporate innovation via the lending channel. We find that bank geographic diversification spurs corporate innovation and enhances the economic value of innovation. We identify relaxing debt covenants and alleviating borrowers’ financial constraints as the two underlying mechanisms explaining the documented effects. Moreover, by offering lenient covenants, geographically diversified banks provide greater financial and operational flexibility to borrowing firms, enabling them to engage in future mergers and acquisitions.

Barton (2001) and Pincus and Rajgopal (2002) show that earnings management through discretionary accruals and derivative hedging are partial substitutes in smoothing earnings before 1999. In this study, we investigate whether Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 133 regarding hedge accounting in 2000 has influenced the relative merit of the two earnings-smoothing methods. Based on a sample of S&P 500 nonfinancial firms during 1996–2006, we find that the substitution relation between derivative hedging and discretionary accrual is significantly attenuated after FAS 133 implementation. We also document a significant increase in earnings volatility associated with derivative hedging post-FAS 133. These results are robust to the use of various model and method specifications, as well as controlling for contemporaneous macroeconomic and regulatory shocks. Overall, our results suggest that a material change in an accounting rule regarding derivatives can influence the level and volatility of reported earnings, as well as the method of income smoothing.

Using a sample of 30,270 forecasts by 2,280 analysts under a stacked difference‐in‐differences framework involving 22 major climatic disasters in the United States, we examine the effect of climatic disasters on information production by security analysts, who play a crucial role in the financial market as information intermediaries. We find that earnings forecasts by analysts who experienced a major climatic disaster become less accurate than those by unaffected analysts within 3 months after the disaster, due to distracted attention. Disaster‐zone analysts are more likely to allocate their attention to firms of greater importance or salience, and they tend to reiterate their previous forecasts to maintain the quantity and timeliness of their forecasts. Overall, we document the real impact of cognitive bias on financial professionals' performance.