We provide new evidence on the substitute role of mobile banking in small business lending after banks close branches. Compared to the matched bank-counties with similar economic conditions and bank financials, small business lending in the treatment counties decreases 0.064 million (equivalent to 18.8%) less after branch closings for banks with mobile apps than banks without mobile apps. The effect is more pronounced in high-income census tracts and for high-rated apps, suggesting that high-income customers and customers whose banks provide better mobile apps are less affected when banks close branches. We do not find a significant impact of having apps on small business lending when banks increase the number of branches. However, the effect of having mobile apps increases with closed branches' years of service. Our results imply that bank branches are still important in providing credit to the local communities. Mobile banking helps preserve the existing customer-bank relationship but cannot reduce information asymmetry.

Using hand-collected CEO education data of 3574 CEOs over the period of 2000 to 2015, we document that CEOs are significantly more likely to acquire targets that are headquartered in those states where the CEOs received their undergraduate and graduate degrees. Education-state deals are larger, have higher completion rates, and exist with both public and private targets. Acquirers pay a lower target premium for education-state deals and the cumulative abnormal announcement returns are positive. The combined evidence suggests that education-state acquisitions are more likely to be driven by bidder CEO's information advantage toward firms headquartered in the education state.

This article analyzes the importance of supply-side fluctuations for corporate hedging. To establish a causal link, we exploit a regulatory change that allows derivatives counterparties to circumvent the Bankruptcy Code’s automatic stay: the Safe Harbor Reform of 2005. Following the reform-induced expansion in the availability of derivatives, fuel hedging by airlines nearing financial distress (those that benefited most from the reform) significantly increased in comparison with financially sound airlines. We find that the hedging propensity similarly increased in a general sample of nonfinancial firms. In line with theory, we also find that operating performance increased for the affected firms.

The blockchain settlement layer facilitates systematic frontrunning, resulting in inefficient block-space allocation. Private transaction pools can reduce these inefficiencies and enhance welfare. However, full adoption is limited by misaligned incentives between users and validators. Validators are reluctant to forgo rents they earn from frontrunning – referred to as maximal extractable value – leading to a partial adoption equilibrium in which frontrunning persists. Our empirical analysis of Ethereum’s Flashbots private pool supports these findings: validators earn higher revenues, users facing greater frontrunning risk are more likely to use the private pool, and attackers’ cost-to-revenue ratios in private pools converge to one.

This paper reconciles conflicting empirical findings in the takeover and firm transparency literature by utilizing a comprehensive takeover index from Cain, McKeon, and Solomon (2017). Examining a broad sample of U.S. public firms from 1970 to 2020, we document a negative relation between takeover susceptibility and firm opacity, measured primarily through stock price crash risk, and also through accrual/real earnings management, financial statement readability, analyst forecast dispersion, and voluntary disclosure. Stronger takeover threats mitigate crash risk by curtailing managerial empire-building incentives, promoting timely information disclosure, and constraining manipulative accounting practices. Our research confirms the effectiveness of the market for corporate control in addressing information-related agency problems and enhancing firm transparency. These findings persist across a broad range of firms and an extended time period, addressing the limitations of earlier studies. By employing a more holistic measure of takeover vulnerability and examining multiple facets of transparency, we provide a nuanced understanding of how corporate governance mechanisms influence firm performance and risk.

Using novel data from the pharmaceutical industry, we study product prices and innovation around mergers. Exploiting within‐deal variation in product market consolidation, we show that prices increase more for drugs in consolidating markets than for matched control drugs. Estimates indicate a 2% average price effect that persists for about one year. Price increases expand with acquirer‐target product similarity and are more pronounced within less competitive product markets with fewer players and no generic competition. Examination of trade‐offs reveals these deals generate significant shareholder value. They also spur labeling and other manufacturing‐related innovation, but not the development of new drugs.

Prior literature has studied firm uniqueness and its implications for capital market participants by investigating earnings uniqueness. We recognize that cost and revenue uniqueness provide separate insights about firm uniqueness because different forces drive firm‐specific revenues and costs. Cost uniqueness is of special interest because costs are opaque to investors and more complex than revenues. Therefore, we examine how cost uniqueness affects information uncertainty from the perspective of external participants. We find that idiosyncratic stock return volatility increases with cost uniqueness independently and incrementally from revenue uniqueness. We validate these results with several cross‐sectional tests that provide insights into the forces that drive the association between information uncertainty and cost uniqueness. In addition, we find that higher cost uniqueness is associated with finer cost disclosure. Overall, we show that cost uniqueness is an important dimension of cost behavior that is linked to strategic decision‐making and affects uncertainty surrounding firm valuation.