This study investigates the association between CEO perquisites and bank loan spreads. We collect detailed data on CEO perquisites from the proxy statements of S&P 500 firms between 1993 and 2015 to study this issue. The empirical evidence supports the agency cost view that the lending banks demand significantly higher returns (spread), more collateral, and stricter covenants from firms with higher CEO perquisites. We further confirm that the effect of these perquisites remains after we control for various corporate governance and agency cost factors. We conclude that banks consider CEO perquisites as a type of agency cost when they make lending decisions.

Equity crowdfunding (ECF) has potential benefits that might be attractive to high-quality entrepreneurs, including fast access to a large pool of investors and obtaining feedback from the market. However, there are potential costs associated with ECF due to early public disclosure of entrepreneurial activities, communication costs with large pools of investors, and equity dilution that could discourage future equity investors; these costs suggest that ECF attracts low-quality entrepreneurs. In this paper, we hypothesize that entrepreneurs tied to more risky banks are more likely to be low-quality entrepreneurs and thus are more likely to use ECF. A large sample of ECF campaigns in Germany shows strong evidence that connections to distressed banks push entrepreneurs to use ECF. We find some evidence, albeit less robust, that entrepreneurs who can access other forms of equity are less likely to use ECF. Finally, the data indicate that entrepreneurs who access ECF are more likely to fail.

We investigate how VC participation affects the failure of startups. Using a unique dataset of the survival of peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms in China, we identify two types of failures, bankruptcy, and run off with investors' money. The Competing Risk Model results show that while VC participation reduces bankruptcy hazard, it has little impact on the runoff failures. The findings are robust to the use of matched subsamples that disentangle the influence of pre-investment screening by VC. Further analysis of exit routes reveals that conditional on failure, VC participation is associated with a higher chance of running for the exit.

This paper examines the effect of credit rating disagreements on merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions. We show that acquirers with split ratings prefer to use stock to finance their acquisitions. More importantly, we find that acquirers with split ratings experience lower announcement returns. Further analysis shows that overpayment by acquirers with split ratings is concentrated in acquirers with entrenched managers. Our results are robust to alternative identification strategies. Overall, our evidence indicates that credit rating disagreements are heavily priced in the M&A market.

Career-concerned analysts are averse to firm risk. Not only does higher firm risk require more effort to analyze the firm, thus constraining analysts' ability to earn more remuneration through covering more firms, but it also jeopardizes their research quality and career advancement. As such, career concerns incentivize analysts to pressure firms to undertake risk-management activities, thus leading to a lower cost of debt. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find a negative association between analyst career concerns and bank loan spreads. In addition, our mediation analysis suggests that this association is achieved through the channel of reducing firm risk. Additional tests suggest that the effect of analyst career concerns on loan spreads is more pronounced for firms with higher analyst coverage. Our study is the first to identify the demand for risk management as a key channel through which analysts help reduce the cost of debt.

Mutual fund families increasingly hold bonds and stocks from the same firm. We study the implications of such dual holdings for corporate governance and firm decision-making. We present evidence that dual ownership allows financially distressed firms to increase investments and to refinance by issuing bonds with lower yields and fewer restrictive covenants. As such, dual ownership reduces shareholder-creditor conflicts, especially when families encourage cooperation among their managers. Overall, our results suggest that mutual fund families internalize the shareholder-creditor agency conflicts of their portfolio companies, highlighting the positive governance externalities of intra-family cooperation.

Workers at larger firms outperform on average. For example, equity analysts working for more reputable brokerage firms produce more accurate earnings forecasts. Analysts employed by the highest ranked brokerages are about 6% more accurate than those employed by the lowest ranked brokerages, which is equivalent to an advantage of 17.5 years of more experience. This outperformance is driven by two significant effects: more reputable firms provide more resources that improve analysts' forecasting ability (influence), while more reputable firms also attract more talented candidates (sorting). We estimate a two-sided matching model to disentangle these two effects. We find that the direct influence effect accounts for 73% of the total impact while the sorting effect accounts for the remaining 27%.

We examine the relationship between protracted CEO successions and stock returns. In protracted successions, an incumbent CEO announces his or her resignation without a known successor, so the incumbent CEO becomes a “lame duck.” We find that 31% of CEO successions from 2005 to 2014 in the S&P 1500 are protracted, during which the incumbent CEO is a lame duck for an average period of about 6 months. During the reign of lame duck CEOs, firms generate an annual four-factor alpha of 11% and exhibit significant positive earnings surprises. Investors’ under-reaction to no news on new CEO information and underestimation of the positive effects of the tournament among the CEO candidates drive our results.

Higher incentive pay is associated with better firm performance. I introduce a model of CEO-firm matching to disentangle the two confounding effects that drive this result. On one hand, higher incentive pay directly induces more effort; on the other hand, higher incentive pay indirectly attracts more talented CEOs. I find both effects are essential to explain the result, with the selection effect accounting for 12.7% of the total effect. The relative importance of the selection effect is the largest in industries with high talent mobility and in more recent years.

The persistent premium of government debt attributes to two main reasons: absolute nominal safety and liquidity. This paper employs two types of measures of government debt supply to disentangle the safety and liquidity part of the premium. The empirical evidence shows that, after controlling for the opportunity cost of money, the quantitative impact of total government debt-to-GDP ratio is still significant and negative, which is consistent with the theoretical predictions of the CAPM with utility surplus of holding convenience assets. The relative availability measure, the ratio of total government liability to all sector total liability, separates the liquidity premium from the safety premium and has a negative impact too. Both theoretical and empirical results suggest that the substitutability between government debt and private safe assets dictates the quantitative impact of the government debt supply.