This study examines the effect of institutional common ownership on a firm's cost of equity capital. Recent literature on common ownership yields opposing predictions: increased strategic alliance in the product market could increase the non-diversifiable covariance risk of a firm's cash flows with other firms, leading to a higher cost of equity capital. However, reduced product market risk that is in part non-diversifiable could lead to a lower cost of equity capital. In both baseline and difference-in-differences settings, we document a negative and significant relation between common ownership and the cost of equity capital. We also provide direct evidence that common ownership reduces product market predation risk, distress risk, and overall risk while increasing stock liquidity. We do not find sufficient evidence that improved corporate governance drives the main findings. Overall, our findings indicate that institutional common ownership offers benefits to individual firms by reducing the cost of equity financing.

Blockholding multiple firms within an industry generates an information advantage for institutional investors, who can better differentiate between the industry-wide and firm-specific nature of bad news released by peer firms and avoid selling on false spillover signals (i.e., “smart exit”). Empirically, we document that industry common ownership reduces future firm-level stock price crash risk. Our results can be explained by the attenuated spillover from industry peers' firm-specific bad news, as a complement to the monitoring effect that reduces the focal firm's hoarding of bad news. Our results suggest that the presence of industry common owners provides a stabilizing effect against stock price contagion.

Stronger creditor rights in bankruptcy are often viewed as adding deadweight costs and leading to inefficient liquidation. However, ex ante, they also increase firms' borrowing capacity and reduce financial constraints. This study investigates shareholders' overall attitudes toward enhanced creditor rights in bankruptcy by examining the impact of the staggered adoption of anti-recharacterization laws across U.S. states on the cost of equity capital. We find that the strengthening of creditor rights leads to a significant reduction in the cost of equity capital, with the effect being more pronounced among financially constrained firms and firms with more growth opportunities and volatile cash flows. The reduction is stronger among firms that are more likely to utilize securitized debt. Overall, our results suggest that enhanced creditor rights in bankruptcy improve shareholder value through increased borrowing capacity.

This paper reconciles conflicting empirical findings in the takeover and firm transparency literature by utilizing a comprehensive takeover index from Cain, McKeon, and Solomon (2017). Examining a broad sample of U.S. public firms from 1970 to 2020, we document a negative relation between takeover susceptibility and firm opacity, measured primarily through stock price crash risk, and also through accrual/real earnings management, financial statement readability, analyst forecast dispersion, and voluntary disclosure. Stronger takeover threats mitigate crash risk by curtailing managerial empire-building incentives, promoting timely information disclosure, and constraining manipulative accounting practices. Our research confirms the effectiveness of the market for corporate control in addressing information-related agency problems and enhancing firm transparency. These findings persist across a broad range of firms and an extended time period, addressing the limitations of earlier studies. By employing a more holistic measure of takeover vulnerability and examining multiple facets of transparency, we provide a nuanced understanding of how corporate governance mechanisms influence firm performance and risk.