We examine whether a firm’s debt maturity structure affects its credit quality. Consistent with theory, we find that firms with greater exposure to rollover risk (measured by the amount of long-term debt payable within a year relative to assets) have lower credit quality; long-term bonds issued by those firms trade at higher yield spreads, indicating that bond market investors are cognizant of rollover risk arising from a firm’s debt maturity structure. These effects are stronger among firms with a speculative-grade rating and declining profitability, and during recessions.

This paper studies the effect of hedge-fund trading on idiosyncratic risk. We hypothesize that while hedge-fund activity would often reduce idiosyncratic risk, high initial levels of idiosyncratic risk might be further amplified due to fund loss limits. Panel-regression analyses provide supporting evidence for this hypothesis. The results are robust to sample selection and are further corroborated by a natural experiment using the Lehman bankruptcy as an exogenous adverse shock to hedge-fund trading. Hedge-fund capital also explains the increased idiosyncratic volatility of high-idiosyncratic-volatility stocks as well as the decreased idiosyncratic volatility of low-idiosyncratic-volatility stocks over the past few decades.

Kothari, Lewellen, and Warner (2006) document that aggregate earnings changes in the United States are negatively related to contemporaneous market returns. In this study we show that this negative aggregate earnings-returns relation is unique to the United States. In 28 non-U.S. markets, aggregate earnings changes are positively associated with contemporaneous market returns. Further evidence shows that the aggregate earnings-returns relation becomes less positive in countries with more transparent financial disclosure that helps investors forecast earnings more precisely. Our result supports Sadka and Sadka’s (2009) argument that predictability of aggregate earnings leads to the negative relation between aggregate earnings and market returns in the United States.

This paper investigates the relation between shareholders’ portfolio concentration and firm performance. Using data on more than 1.3 million unique shareholders, we create an index that measures how concentrated shareholder portfolios are in each firm. We posit that portfolio concentration will affect incentives when shareholders are resource constrained. We find that average shareholder portfolio concentration is positively related to future operational performance and valuation. We also find that portfolio concentration is positively correlated with abnormal stock returns. Our findings suggest that shareholders with concentrated portfolios are more informed and play a governance role through the stock market.

We survey theoretical and empirical research on antitakeover provisions, focusing on the relation between antitakeover provisions and shareholder value. We divide the empirical studies based upon the evidence that they provide: short-term event studies, studies on performance and policy changes around adopting antitakeover provisions or passing state antitakeover laws, studies on the impact of antitakeover provisions on takeovers, studies on the relation between antitakeover provisions and firm characteristics, and long-term studies on the relation between antitakeover provisions and firm performance or policies. We also discuss the place of antitakeover provisions in the current debate about “good governance” practices.

We develop a theory to show how external and internal corporate governance mechanisms affect innovation. We predict a U-shaped relation between innovation and external takeover pressure, which arises from the interaction between expected takeover premia and private benefits of control. Using ex ante and ex post innovation measures, we find strong empirical support for the predicted relation. We exploit the variation in takeover pressure created by the passage of antitakeover laws across different states. Innovation is fostered either by an unhindered market for corporate control or by antitakeover laws that are severe enough to effectively deter takeovers.

Investment managers are subject to personal and institutional norms that can constrain their investment choices. We conjecture that norm-constrained investors deviate from such norms only when they have compelling information, and we predict that deviating investments earn relatively high abnormal returns ex post. Consistent with our conjecture, we find that institutions averse to holding lottery-like stocks or sin stocks earn relatively high abnormal returns when they choose to hold such stocks. We find similar but weaker results for deviations from broader style categories. Overall, our evidence indicates that deviations from established institutional or social norms signal informed investing.

We analyze the impact of institutional and cultural differences on success in global venture capital (VC) investing. In both developed and emerging economies, superior legal rights (and enforcement) and better developed stock markets significantly enhance VC performance. Remarkably, cultural distance between countries of the portfolio company and its lead investor positively affects VC success. Further analysis reveals that cultural differences create incentives for rigorous ex ante screening, improving VC performance. Finally, local VC participation enhances success and mitigates foreign VCs’ “liability of foreignness,” albeit only in developed economies. Our findings follow from analyzing VC investments in nearly 10,000 companies across 30 countries.

We demonstrate improvements in predictive power when introducing spline functions to take account of highly nonlinear relationships between firm failure and leverage, earnings, and liquidity in a logistic bankruptcy model. Our results show that modeling excessive nonlinearities yields substantially improved bankruptcy predictions, on the order of 70%–90%, compared with a standard logistic model. The spline model provides several important and surprising insights into nonmonotonic bankruptcy relationships. We find that low-leveraged as well as highly profitable firms are riskier than those given by a standard model, possibly a manifestation of credit rationing and excess cash-flow volatility.

We examine shareholder litigation and the price and nonprice terms of bank loan contracts. After filing a lawsuit, defendant firms pay higher loan spreads and up-front charges, experience more financial covenants, and are more likely to have a collateral requirement. These findings are consistent with reputational losses associated with shareholder litigation. The magnitude of a firm’s lost market value when the lawsuit is filed is positively related to the increase in the firm’s future borrowing costs. We investigate whether the lawsuit allegations and its merit affect future bank loan terms. Our results do not appear to be affected by self-selection.