We document a significant and positive relation between institutional block ownership and the number of bond covenants. This finding is robust to different measures of blockholding, alternative regression models, and endogeneity considerations. The positive association between blockholding and covenants is stronger for active as well as for short-term blockholders, suggesting that covenants are employed ex ante to mitigate incentive conflicts between shareholders and bondholders. While both covenants and blockholding are positively related to borrowing costs, their interaction implies that covenants attenuate the increase in borrowing costs resulting from more concentrated block ownership.

We examine impediments to liquidity provision by mutual funds to insurance companies during corporate bond fire sales. We find that financial regulation and limited capital capacity significantly affect liquidity provision. Mutual funds reduced their purchase of fire-sale bonds following regulatory changes after the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Funds facing more capital constraints (proxied by smaller cash and Treasury holdings, less liquid corporate bond investments, higher redemption risk, and less active investment styles) provide less liquidity. Mutual funds actively investing in fire-sale bonds earn significant returns from liquidity provision and demonstrate superior overall skills in corporate bond investments.

We examine the real effect of partial privatization on corporate innovation. To establish causality, we explore plausibly exogenous variation in the expectation of further partial privatization generated by China's split share structure reform, which mandatorily converts non-tradable shares into freely tradable shares and opens up the gate to the further privatization of state-owned enterprises. We find that partial privatization prospects have a positive effect on corporate innovation. A better alignment of the interests of government agents with those of private shareholders and improved stock price informativeness appear to be two plausible underlying mechanisms. Our paper sheds new light on the real effects of partial privatization.