Borrowers obtain liquidity by issuing securities backed by the current period payoff and resale price of a long-lived collateral asset, and they are privately informed about the payoff distribution. Asset price can be self-fulfilling: a higher asset price lowers adverse selection and allows borrowers to raise greater funding, which makes the asset more valuable, leading to multiple equilibria. Optimal security design eliminates multiple equilibria, improves welfare, and can be implemented as a repo contract. Persistent adverse selection lowers debt funding, generates volatility in asset prices, and exacerbates credit crunches. The theory demonstrates the role of asset-backed securities on stability of market-based financial systems.

We explore whether municipalities with public sector unions exploit aspects of governmental (or “fund”) accounting to obscure the availability of discretionary resources in fund balance accounts, relative to municipalities without public sector unions. We first investigate whether governments with unions report higher proportions of discretionary resources outside of the general fund, a primary measure of financial health, and instead within less prominent fund types. Second, we explore whether governments with unions report lower ratios within accessible general fund balance account categories – that is, report lower proportions of unreserved fund balance. Primary findings are consistent with both hypotheses. Although somewhat mixed, cross‐sectional analyses reveal that effects are magnified when unions have more bargaining power, as proxied by the ability to strike or the absence of state right‐to‐work laws. Further analysis corroborates cross‐sectional findings by examining difference‐in‐differences specifications surrounding the quasi‐exogenous shock of Wisconsin's 2011 weakening of state public sector union laws and Ohio's time‐varying union contract negotiations. Overall, the evidence suggests that governments with unions shelter resources to avoid the appearance of large discretionary amounts available.

When companies select and use compensation peers to determine chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, they create unintended peer effects on corporate innovation due to the similarities between these companies and their compensation peers in terms of product markets, CEO characteristics, and compensation schemes. After controlling for industry and geography peer groups, the findings confirm that the average innovation activity of compensation peers is a significant and distinct predictor of corporate innovation. Further analysis showed that (1) the peer effect is stronger in firms and compensation peers that pay their CEOs using long-term compensation, in firms with stronger labor market competition and board monitoring, and in peer companies that experience higher innovation competition and are closer to the median peer company in the peer group; (2) the obtained results are likely not attributable to the knowledge spillover mechanism and are more consistent with the peer pressure mechanism; and (3) the Securities and Exchange Commission's 2006 executive compensation disclosure rules may have generated peer effects.

We exploit the staggered state-level enactment of the Uniform Trade Secret Act (UTSA) to examine the impact of intellectual property (IP) protection on product market dynamics. We find that UTSA-impacted firms shift their IP strategy to rely more on trade secrets and less on patents. Less IP disclosure increases information asymmetry and rival firms must adapt their competitive strategies as espionage and reverse engineering become more costly. Predation risk increases, and rivals engage in more intense price and non-price competition. Additionally, we find the probability of being acquired increases post-UTSA as rivals seek to acquire innovation, resulting in more concentrated product markets. Further, we find that the stock market generally views UTSA favorably.

Employing the staggered opening of the High-speed railway (HSR) as an exogenous shock, this paper examines the impact of functional distance on bank loan pricing. Based on a unique loan-level dataset from a nationwide state-owned Chinese commercial bank, we find that after the HSR opening, the loan pricing of local private firms decreases significantly. The possible channel is the facilitating of bank's easier access to soft information through the shortening of temporal functional distance. Moreover, the effect of HSR opening is more pronounced when the borrowing firm is difficult to visit or when loan pricing is more sensitive to information. We also find that the HSR opening increases the loan volume for local private firms, while there are no significant changes in loan pricing or loan volume for public firms with HSR opening. Our main conclusion remains valid after considering various robustness and endogeneity issues.