A two-stage stock-financed merger occurs when an acquiring firm first issues shares, and then engages in a cash acquisition shortly afterward. Such deals allow us to test two important hypotheses derived from decoupling: by clienteles via segmentation and by time. The acquirer's value is maximized by selling shares to investors preferring to hold them, and use the raised cash to pay the target shareholders (the decoupling by clienteles hypothesis). Two-stage deals also provide an option to the acquirers by allowing them to decouple their own shares from the correlated target's shares by issuing at an earlier date and wait for good acquisition opportunities (the time decoupling hypothesis). We find empirical evidence in support of both hypotheses.

We investigate the stock price reactions of industry competitors to IPOs in China. Contrary to findings in the U.S., we document a positive valuation effect of Chinese IPOs from 2002 to 2013. This finding is robust to alternative rival definitions, investor reaction measurement, and sample selection criteria. Based on the existing theories and institutional setup of the Chinese stock market, we propose three non-competing hypotheses: the signaling hypothesis (i.e., IPOs could convey positive industry-related information), the collusion hypothesis (i.e., rival firms can benefit from the increasing likelihood of collusion), and the substitution hypothesis (i.e., rival stocks can substitute for IPO stocks as an appealing investment). With a series of tests, we demonstrate that the substitution hypothesis can explain this phenomenon. Furthermore, we find that the spillover effects of IPOs decline with the increase in investment choices after 2014.

In this article, we examine the effect of social trust on local bias. Our evidence suggests that institutional investors located in high-trust regions of the United States exhibit lower local bias. Moreover, we find that high-trust investors are better diversified, suggesting that trust helps accomplish greater diversification. The results are not due to firm, demographic, or local economic characteristics. Additional analysis reveals that the documented informational advantage in local holdings exists only in low-trust regions. We show that this finding is consistent with a trust explanation.

The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: as the sex ratio rises, Chinese parents with a son raise their savings in a competitive manner in order to improve their son's relative attractiveness for marriage. The pressure on savings spills over to other households. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis. This factor can potentially account for about half the actual increase in the household savings rate during 1990-2007.

We provide firm-level evidence that credit constraints restrict international trade and affect the pattern of multinational activity. We show that foreign affiliates and joint ventures in China have better export performance than private domestic firms in financially more vulnerable sectors. These results are stronger for destinations with higher trade costs and not driven by firm size or other sector characteristics. Our findings are consistent with multinational subsidiaries being less liquidity constrained because they can access foreign capital markets or funding from their parent company. They further suggest that FDI can alleviate the impact of domestic financial market imperfections on trade.

We examine corporate tax avoidance of firms around addition to the S&P 500 index. We find that corporate tax avoidance for firms at high levels of tax avoidance decreases after index addition, whereas tax avoidance for firms at low levels of tax avoidance increases after index addition. We disentangle the impact of changing governance practices from that of declining investment opportunities. Our findings indicate that the changes in tax avoidance can be attributed to improving governance practices, specifically higher institutional ownership and executive compensations, and this impact is above and beyond the changes in growth opportunities of index firms.

Using financial and ownership data from eight East Asian emerging markets before the Asian financial crisis, we document that while the sensitivity of a firm's capital investment to its cash flow decreases as the cash-flow rights of its largest shareholders increase, this sensitivity increases as the degree of the divergence between the control rights and cash-flow rights of the firm's largest shareholders increases. We interpret the results to be consistent with the free cash-flow hypothesis, which postulates that too much free cash flow in the hands of entrenched managers is likely to lead to overinvestment. This is particularly true for firms with the greatest divergence between the largest shareholders' control rights and their cash-flow rights and for firms with lower profitability.

We propose an alternative measure of the long-term economic impact of mergers on firm value: post-acquisition changes in intrinsic value. Consistent with the literature on post-acquisition returns, the intrinsic value of merged firms decreases on average in the three years following deal completion, especially for firms with high initial intrinsic values. The loss of intrinsic value is driven primarily by decreases in expected earnings. Finally, using return decompositions, we find evidence that the poor post-acquisition stock returns documented in other studies can be attributed primarily to lost intrinsic value rather than changes in valuation levels.

A recent study by Goyal and Santa-Clara [J. Finance 58 (2003) 975] finds a significantly positive relationship between average stock returns and pre-determined average return volatility measures, while finding no relationship between the average return and its own volatility. The result is interpreted as evidence that idiosyncratic risk matters in asset pricing. We re-examine the issue in extended sample periods and find the proclaimed positive relationship is not substantiated. Our analysis indicates that the above-mentioned positive relationship is mainly driven by the data in the 1990s. The trading strategy suggested by Goyal and Santa-Clara to exploit the return predictability by pre-determined volatility does not yield sustained economic gains.