We comprehensively examine the effects of stock return volatility on firms’ financial and investment decisions. Consistent with theories of investment with financing frictions, firms with high volatility actively reduce their leverage, cut investment, increase cash holding, cut non-cash current assets such as inventories and account receivables, and cut dividend. The effects of volatility are s...

In an efficient economy, capital should be quickly (re)allocated from declining firms and sectors to more profitable investment opportunities. This process is affected by the concentration of corporate control, which in turn is affected by market institutions. We employ a panel of 12,000 firms across 44 countries to estimate the functional efficiency of capital markets. We adapt a measure for t...

We find significant relations between active mutual fund portfolio holdings and executive compensation, which appear to be largely driven by mutual fund investment styles rather than monitoring behaviour. Aggressive growth fund holdings are associated with performance pay, while income fund holdings are negatively related. We also find that mutual fund holdings are insensitive to changes in exe...

I show that firms may optimally sell blocks of their own equity to other firms in anticipation of future corporate control activity. In the model, a target and one potential acquirer, who may also be an alliance partner, can negotiate before synergy values are learned. I find that equity implements an optimal mechanism, allowing the partners to extract surplus from outside bidders who may arriv...

Trading frictions in financial markets affect more long-term than short-term bonds, generating an upward-sloping yield curve. Long-term financing is expensive economies with higher trading so firms choose to borrow and invest shorter horizons lower productivity projects. The theory guides a new identification of the slope liquidity spread data. We measure calibrate model for United States, coun...

We study how to design an optimal government loan program for risky R&D projects with positive externalities. With adverse selection, the contract involves a high interest rate but nearly zero cofinancing by entrepreneur. This contrasts sharply observed schemes. selection and moral hazard, allowing two levels of effort entrepreneur, policy consists menu at most contracts, one self-financing...

The sharp distinction drawn between firms rated narrowly above (BBB–) and below (BB+) the investment-grade cutoff provides variation in debt financing availability unrelated to firm fundamentals. We exploit this market segmentation to identify an asymmetric effect of debt capital supply on voluntary disclosure: BB+ firms step up disclosure in response to high-yield bond mutual fund outflows. Th...

We measure U.S. publicly traded companies’ exposures to skilled labor risk, i.e., the potential failure in attracting and retaining skilled labor, by the intensity of their discussions on this issue in their 10-K filings. We show that this measure effectively captures firm risk due to the mobility of skilled labor. We find that skilled labor risk is an important determinant of corporate compens...

This article reports a unique analysis of private engagements by an activist fund. It is based on data made available to us by Hermes, the fund manager owned by the British Telecom Pension Scheme, on engagements with management in companies targeted by its UK Focus Fund. In contrast with most previous studies of activism, we report that the fund executes shareholder activism predominantly throu...

We examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and performance of recipient firms, using of panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We find that joint-ventures perform better than wholly foreign owned and purely domestic firms. Although productivity and profitability initially rise with foreign ownership, they start declining once foreign ownership reaches ...