This paper examines the costs, wealth effects, and determinants of international capital raising for a sample of 260 public debt issues made by non-U.S. firms in the Yankee bond market. We find that investors demand economically significant premiums on bonds issued by firms that are located in countries that do not protect investors' rights and do not have a prior history of ongoing disclosure. The results provide support for the literature that suggests better legal protections and more detailed information disclosure increases the price investors will pay for financial assets. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: F3, G1.

This paper examines the potential benefits of security fungibility by conducting the first comprehensive analysis of global bonds. Unlike other debt securities, global bonds' fungibility allows them to be placed simultaneously in bond markets around the world; they trade, clear, and settle efficiently within as well as across markets. We test the impact of issuing these securities on firms' cost of capital, issuing costs, liquidity, and shareholder wealth. Using a sample of 230 global bond issues by 94 companies from the U.S. and abroad over the period 1996–2003, we find that firms lower their cost of (debt) capital by issuing these fungible securities. We also document that the stock price reaction to the announcement of global bond issuance is positive and significant, while comparable domestic and eurobond issues over the same time period are associated with insignificant changes in shareholder wealth.

In this paper, we examine how stock option usage affects total corporate payout. Using fixed-effects panel data estimators on various samples of ExecuComp firms from 1993 to 2005, we find the higher the executive stock options, the lower the total payout, ceteris paribus. We also find some evidence that firms increase payouts through repurchases in order to offset earnings per share dilution that occurs due to usage of executive and non-executive stock options. However, incentives from not having dividend protection for options appear to dominate those from antidilution, resulting in lower total payout for firms with higher options usage.