A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.
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Results 413 resources
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I develop a dynamic model of leverage with tax deductible interest and an endogenous cost of default. The interest rate includes a premium to compensate lenders for expected losses in default. A borrowing constraint is generated by lenders' unwillingness to lend an amount that would trigger immediate default. When the borrowing constraint is not binding, the trade‐off theory of debt holds: optimal debt equates the marginal interest tax shield and the marginal expected cost of default. Contrary to conventional interpretation, but consistent with empirical findings, increases in current or future profitability reduce the optimal leverage ratio when the trade‐off theory holds.
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I analyze investment, q, and cash flow in a tractable stochastic model in which marginal q and average q are identically equal. I introduce classical measurement error and derive closed-form expressions for the coefficients in regressions of investment on q and cash flow. The cash-flow coefficient is positive and larger for faster growing firms, yet there are no financial frictions in the model. I develop the concepts of bivariate attenuation and weight shifting to interpret the estimated coefficients on q and cash flow in the presence of measurement error.
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We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census microdata on firm-level output, R&D, and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output, and R&D. Taxing the continued operation of incumbents can lead to sizable gains (of the order of 1.4 percent improvement in welfare) by encouraging exit of less productive firms and freeing up skilled labor to be used for R&D by high-type incumbents. Subsidies to the R&D of incumbents do not achieve this objective because they encourage the survival and expansion of low-type firms.
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Unprecedented street protests brought down Mubarak’s government and ushered in an era of competition between three rival political groups in Egypt. Using daily variation in the number of protesters, we document that more intense protests are associated with lower stock market valuations for firms connected to the group currently in power relative to non-connected firms, but have no impact on the relative valuations of firms connected to rival groups. These results suggest that street protests serve as a partial check on political rent-seeking. General discontent expressed on Twitter predicts protests but has no direct effect on valuations.
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We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a static version where capital is fixed and technology is exogenous, automation reduces employment and the labor share, and may even reduce wages, while the creation of new tasks has the opposite effects. Our full model endogenizes capital accumulation and the direction of research toward automation and the creation of new tasks. If the long-run rental rate of capital relative to the wage is sufficiently low, the long-run equilibrium involves automation of all tasks. Otherwise, there exists a stable balanced growth path in which the two types of innovations go hand-in-hand. Stability is a consequence of the fact that automation reduces the cost of producing using labor, and thus discourages further automation and encourages the creation of new tasks. In an extension with heterogeneous skills, we show that inequality increases during transitions driven both by faster automation and the introduction of new tasks, and characterize the conditions under which inequality stabilizes in the long run.
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We explore the causes of the credit crunch during the European sovereign debt crisis and its impact on the corporate policies of European firms. Our results show that value impairment in banks’ exposures to sovereign debt and the risk-shifting behavior of weakly capitalized banks reduced the probability of firms being granted new syndicated loans by up to 53%. This lending contraction depressed investment, employment, and sales growth of firms affiliated with affected banks. Our estimates based on firm-level data suggest that the credit crunch explains between 44% and 66% of the overall negative real effects suffered by European firms.
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Directors are not one-dimensional. We characterize their skill sets by exploiting Regulation S-K's 2009 requirement that U.S. firms must disclose the experience, qualifications, attributes, or skills that led the nominating committee to choose an individual as a director. We then examine how skills cluster on and across boards. Factor analysis indicates that the main dimension along which boards vary is in the diversity of skills of their directors. We find that firm performance increases when director skill sets exhibit more commonality.
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What makes a successful CEO? We combine a near-exhaustive sample of male CEOs from Swedish companies with data on their cognitive and noncognitive ability and height at age 18. CEOs differ from other high-skill professions most in noncognitive ability. The median large-company CEO belongs to the top 5% of the population in the combination of the three traits. The traits have a monotonic and close to linear relation with CEO pay, but their correlations with pay, firm size, and CEO fixed effects in firm policies are relatively low. Traits appear necessary but not sufficient for making it to the top.
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Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value. Shareholders would instead choose to increase leverage even if the new debt is junior and would reduce firm value. These asymmetric forces in leverage adjustments, which we call the leverage ratchet effect, cause equilibrium leverage outcomes to be history‐dependent. If forced to reduce leverage, shareholders are biased toward selling assets relative to potentially more efficient alternatives such as pure recapitalizations.
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The U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee considered many important banking reforms in 2009 to 2010. We show that, during this period, foreclosure starts on delinquent mortgages were delayed in the districts of committee members although there was no difference in delinquency rates between committee and noncommittee districts. In these areas, banks delayed the foreclosure starts by 0.5 months (relative to the 12‐month average). The estimated cost of delay to lenders is an order of magnitude greater than the campaign contributions by the political action committees of the largest mortgage servicing banks to the committee members in that period.
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Journals
- American Economic Review (113)
- Journal of Finance (66)
- Journal of Financial Economics (114)
- Review of Financial Studies (120)
Topic
- Bond (36)
- CEO (17)
- Mergers and Acquisitions (10)
- Capital Structure (7)
- Director (6)
Resource type
- Journal Article (413)