Recent reforms across Eastern European countries have given more flexibility and information to parties to engage in secured debt transactions. The menu of assets legally accepted as collateral was enlarged to include movable assets (e.g., machinery and equipment). Generalized difference-in-differences tests show that firms operating more movable assets borrowed more as a result. Those firms also invested more, hired more, and became more efficient and profitable following the changes in the contracting environment. The financial deepening we document triggered important reallocation effects: firms affected by the reforms increased their share of fixed assets and employment in the economy.

[Pledgeable assets support more borrowing, which allows for further investment in pledgeable assets. We use this credit multiplier to identify the impact of financing frictions on corporate investment. The multiplier suggests that investment-cash flow sensitivities should be increasing in the tangibility of firms' assets (a proxy for pledgeability), but only if firms are financially constrained. Our empirical results confirm this theoretical prediction. Our approach is not subject to the Kaplan and Zingales (1997) critique, and sidesteps problems stemming from unobservable variation in investment opportunities. Thus, our results strongly suggest that financing frictions affect investment decisions.]

Previous research seeks to establish whether debt boosts or hurts a firm's product market performance. This paper proposes that both of these outcomes can be observed: debt can boost and hurt performance. I first model a nonmonotonic relation between debt-like finance and competitive conduct. I then empirically examine the within-industry relation between leverage and sales performance using data from 115 industries over 30 years. My tests deal with the endogeneity of debt in a novel fashion: I use creditors’ valuation of assets in liquidation to identify financial leverage. I find that moderate debt taking is associated with relative-to-rival sales gains; high indebtedness, however, leads to product market underperformance.

This paper provides firm- and industry-level evidence of the effects of capital structure on product market outcomes for a large cross-section of industries over a number of years. The analysis uses shocks to aggregate demand as surrogates for exogenous changes in the product market environment. I find that debt financing has a negative impact on firm (relative-to-industry) sales growth in industries in which rivals are relatively unlevered during recessions, but not during booms. In contrast, no such effects are observed for firms competing in high-debt industries. At the industry level, markups are more countercyclical when industry debt is high. The cyclical dynamics I find for firm sales growth and for industry markups are consistent with Chevalier and Scharfstein's (American Economic Review (1996)) prediction that firms which rely heavily on external financing are more likely to cut their investment in market share building in response to negative shocks to demand and that the competitive outcomes resulting from such actions depend on the financial structures of their industry rivals.

[We construct firm-specific measures of expected equity returns using corporate bond yields, and replace standard ex post average returns with our expected-return measures in asset pricing tests. We find that the market beta is significantly priced in the cross section of expected returns. The expected size and value premiums are positive and countercyclical, but there is no evidence of positive expected momentum profits.]

This paper examines whether firms manage analyst forecasts and the associated value consequences. We find that earnings forecasts tend to grow pessimistic over the forecast horizon and these forecast changes and their timing are key determinants of whether firms generate positive earnings surprises: Late forecasts that raise (lower) the consensus sharply reduce (raise) the probability of positive surprises. This findng is the opposite of that predicted if consensus revisions reflected new information arrival. Investors seem to be “misled”: downward consensus revisions lead to large abnormal returns following the earnings announcement. Paradoxically, downward forecast management reduces post-announcement share price, as the impact of reduced forecasts dominates the gain from generating positive surprises.

[We use Monte Carlo simulations and real data to assess the performance of methods dealing with measurement error in investment equations. Our experiments show that fixed effects, error heteroscedasticity, and flata skewness severely affect the performance and reliability of methods found in the literature. Estimators that use higher-order moments return biased coefficients for (both) mismeasured and perfectly measured regressors. These estimators are also very inefficient. Instrumental-variable-type estimators are more robust and efficient, although they require restrictive assumptions. We estimate empirical investment models using alternative methods. Real-world investment data contain firm-fixed effects and heteroscedasticity, causing high-order moments estimators to deliver coefficients that are unstable and not economically meaningful. Instrumental variables methods yield estimates that are robust and conform to theoretical priors. Our analysis provides guidance for dealing with measurement errors under circumstances researchers are likely to find in practice.]

This paper looks at internal capital markets in financial conglomerates by comparing the responses of small subsidiary and independent banks to monetary policy. I find that internal capital markets in financial conglomerates relax the credit constraints faced by smaller bank affiliates. Further analysis indicates that those markets lessen the impact of Fed policies on bank lending activity. The paper also examines the role of internal capital markets in influencing the investment allocation process of those conglomerates. My findings suggest that frictions between conglomerate headquarters and external capital markets are at the root of investment inefficiencies generated by internal capital markets.

We characterize the relation between asset structure and capital structure by exploiting variation in the salability of corporate assets. To establish this link, we distinguish across different assets in firms’ balance sheets (machinery, land, and buildings) and use an instrumental approach that incorporates market conditions for those assets. We also use a natural experiment driving differential increases in the supply of real estate assets across the United States: The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990. Consistent with a supply-side view of capital structure, we find that asset redeployability is a main driver of leverage when credit frictions are high.