This paper analyzes how managerial control of voting rights affects firm value and financing policies. It shows that an increase in the fraction of voting rights controlled by management decreases the probability of a successful tender offer and increases the premium offered if a tender offer is made. Depending on whether managerial control of voting rights is small or large, shareholders' wealth increases or falls when management strengthens its control of voting rights. Management can change the fraction of the votes it controls through capital structure changes, corporate charter amendments, and the acquisition of shareholder clienteles.

This paper provides analytical formulas for European put and call options on the minimum or the maximum of two risky assets. The properties of these formulas are discussed in detail. Options on the minimum or the maximum of two risky assets are useful to price a wide variety of contingent claims of interest to financial economists. Applications discussed in this paper include the valuation of foreign currency debt, option-bonds, compensation plans, risk-sharing contracts, secured debt and growth opportunities involving mutually exclusive investments.

In this paper an intertemporal model of international asset pricing is constructed which admits differences in consumption opportunity sets across countries. It is shown that the real expected excess return on a risky asset is proportional to the covariance of the return of that asset with changes in the world real consumption rate. (World real consumption does not, in general, correspond to a basket of commodities consumed by all investors.) The model has no barriers to international investment, but it is compatible with empirical facts which contradict the predictions of earlier models and which seem to imply that asset markets are internationally segmented.

This paper analyzes the pricing of two types of secured debt and shows that secured debt can be used to increase the value of the firm. In particular, it is shown that some profitable projects will not be undertaken by a firm which can use only equity or unsecured debt to finance them but will be undertaken if they can be financed with secured debt. Secured debt is priced for a firm with two assets and some unsecured debt outstanding. The pricing results are used to illustrate the benefits of the security provision of secured debt.

For a sample of successful tender offers, we find that the shareholders of high q bidders gain significantly more than the shareholders of low q bidders. In general, the shareholders of low q targets benefit more from takeovers than the shareholders of high q targets. Typical bidders have persistently low q ratios prior to the acquisition announcement while target q ratios decline significantly over the five years before the tender offer. Our results are consistent with the view that takeovers of poorly managed targets by well-managed bidders have higher bidder, target, and total gains.

On average, significant positive abnormal returns are associated with Eurobond issues during the period 1975–1985. The cross-sectional and time-series distributions of the abnormal returns are consistent with the hypothesis that impediments to the adjustment of asset supplies to new demand conditions are large enough to create profitable financing opportunities for firms. Our analysis demonstrates how profitable financing opportunities can persist on the Eurobond market and when they are most likely to arise.

We show that there is a negative relation between leverage and future growth at the firm level and, for diversified firms, at the business segment level. This negative relation between leverage and growth holds for firms with low Tobin's q ratio, but not for high-q firms or firms in high-q industries. Therefore, leverage does not reduce growth for firms known to have good investment opportunities, but is negatively related to growth for firms whose growth opportunities are either not recognized by the capital markets or are not sufficiently valuable to overcome the effects of their debt overhang.

This paper investigates the effect of bankruptcy announcements on the equity value of the bankrupt firm's competitors. On average, bankruptcy announcements decrease the value of a value-weighted portfolio of competitors by 1%. This negative effect is significantly larger for highly levered industries and industries where the unconditional stock returns of the nonbankrupt and bankrupt firms are highly correlated; the effect is significantly positive for highly concentrated industries with low leverage, suggesting that in such industries competitors benefit from the difficulties of the bankrupt firm.

This paper investigates the ability of the pecking-order model, the agency model, and the timing model to explain firms' decisions whether to issue debt or equity, the shock price reaction to their decisions and their actions afterward. We find strong support for the agency model. Firms often depart from the pecking order because of agency considerations. We fail to find support for the timing model.

We develop a measure of free cash flow using Tobin's q to distinguish between firms that have good investment opportunities and those that do not. In a sample of successful tender offers, bidder returns are significantly negatively related to cash flow for low q bidders but not for high q bidders; further, the relation between cash flow and bidder returns differs significantly for low q and high q bidders. This result holds for several cash flow measures suggested in the literature and also in multivariate regressions controlling for bidder and contest-specific characteristics.