Are firms more resilient to systemic banking crises in economies with higher levels of social trust? Using firm-level data in 34 countries from 1990 through 2011, we find that liquidity-dependent firms in high-trust countries obtain more trade credit and suffer smaller drops in profits and employment during banking crises than similar firms in low-trust economies. The results are consistent with the view that when banking crises block the normal bank-lending channel, greater social trust facilitates access to informal finance, cushioning the effects of these crises on corporate profits and employment.

We compare innovation strategies of public and private firms based on a large sample over the period 1997–2008. We find that public firms’ patents rely more on existing knowledge, are more exploitative, and are less likely in new technology classes, while private firms’ patents are broader in scope and more exploratory. We investigate whether these strategies are due to differences in firm information environments, CEO risk preferences, firm life cycles, corporate acquisition policies, or investment horizons between these two groups of firms. Our evidence suggests that the shorter investment horizon associated with public equity markets is a key explanatory factor.

We examine the suitability of using overnight returns to measure firm-specific investor sentiment by analyzing whether they possess characteristics expected of a sentiment measure. We document short-term overnight-return persistence, consistent with existing evidence of short-term persistence in the share demand of sentiment-influenced investors. We find that short-term persistence is stronger for harder-to-value firms, consistent with existing evidence that sentiment plays a larger role for such firms. We show that stocks with high (low) overnight returns underperform (outperform) over the longer term, consistent with prior evidence of temporary sentiment-driven mispricing. Overall, our evidence supports using overnight returns to measure firm-specific sentiment.

We use a multitude of tax reforms across the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries as natural experiments to estimate the market value of the tax benefits of debt financing. We report time-series evidence that tax reforms are followed by large changes in the value of corporate equity. However, the impact of tax reforms is greatly mitigated by the presence of leverage. The value of debt tax savings is greater among top taxpayers, among highly profitable firms, and in countries where tax laws are more strongly enforced. Importantly, the value of debt tax savings is in line with the benchmark implied by a traditional approach.

To price assets with a parsimonious set of factor-mimicking portfolios, one typically identifies and weights well-diversified basis portfolios. Traditional weightings lead to factor-mimicking portfolios that are unlikely to price even the basis portfolios from which they are formed. We offer a method to combine basis portfolios into a single factor-mimicking portfolio that is closely linked to the optimal portfolio. In practice, this method improves the pricing accuracy of parsimonious factor models, even for anomaly portfolios formed from characteristics that are distinct from those underlying the basis portfolios.

Firms in industry clusters have market prices that are more efficient than firms outside clusters. To establish causality, we analyze exogenous firm relocations and find that firms that relocate into industry clusters have higher levels of industry information in their prices. We argue that geographical proximity allows for information spillovers, reducing marginal cost to information producers. Our evidence supports this view: Analysts are more likely to cover stocks inside industry clusters, and when institutional investors have a large position in one stock in the industry cluster, they are more likely to hold other stocks in the same industry cluster.

We propose a new multi-factor model for international stock returns that includes size, value, and momentum factor portfolios and that builds them in a partial-segmentation capital market framework. Accounting for externalities driven by the incomplete accessibility to stocks and stock markets, our model not only captures strong common variation in international stock returns but also achieves low pricing errors and rejection rates relative to pure segmentation and pure integration models. This partial-segmentation approach is evaluated using monthly returns for over 37,000 stocks from 46 developed and emerging market countries over 2 decades and for a wide variety of test assets.

We provide an entropy approach for measuring the asymmetric comovement between the return on a single asset and the market return. This approach yields a model-free test for stock return asymmetry, generalizing the correlation-based test proposed by Hong, Tu, and Zhou (2007). Based on this test, we find that asymmetry is much more pervasive than previously thought. Moreover, our approach also provides an entropy-based measure of downside asymmetric comovement. In the cross section of stock returns, we find an asymmetry premium: Higher downside asymmetric comovement with the market indicates higher expected returns.

We test the hypothesis that low-visibility shocks to text-based network industry peers can explain industry momentum. We consider industry peer firms identified through 10-K product text and focus on economic peer links that do not share common Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. Shocks to less visible peers generate economically large momentum profits and are stronger than own-firm momentum variables. More visible traditional SIC-based peers generate only small, short-lived momentum profits. Our findings are consistent with momentum profits arising partially from inattention to economic links of less visible industry peers.

We apply methods designed to measure mutual fund skill to a cross section of funds that is unlikely to exhibit managerial portfolio selection skill: index funds. Surprisingly, these tests imply index fund skill exists, is persistent, and is in similar proportion as in active funds. We use the distribution of passive fund performance to gauge the incremental ability of active managers. Outperformance by top active funds is lower when benchmarked to the index fund distribution and disappears when we account for residual risk. Stochastic dominance tests suggest no risk-averse investor should choose a random active fund over a random index fund.

We investigate whether short sellers contribute toward the informational efficiency of market prices by trading on their private information or destabilize market prices by trading on rumors and false information. We find that short-selling activities are considerably informative about future stock returns when there is a higher likelihood of private information in stocks, as measured by insider-trading activities. Short sellers also bring considerable additional information to the market that is not fully captured by contemporaneous insider trading. Overall, these results suggest that on average, short sellers bring informational efficiency to market prices rather than destabilize them.

Ambiguity and learning about the equity premium can simultaneously explain the low fraction of financial wealth allocated to stocks over the life cycle and the stock market participation puzzle. Individuals are ambiguous about the size of the equity premium and are averse to this ambiguity, resulting in lower stock allocations over the life cycle, consistent with the data. As agents get older, they learn about the equity premium and increase their allocation to stocks. Furthermore, I find that ambiguity leads to underdiversification, home bias, lower Sharpe ratios, and higher savings. Similar results cannot be obtained by assuming higher risk aversion.

We investigate how financial contracting interacts with lending-channel effects by tracing the anatomy of a credit supply shock using micro-level data from a multinational bank. Borrowers with stronger lending relationships, higher nonlending revenues, and those that pledge collateral, especially outside assets and real estate, experience less credit rationing. Consistent with a tightening of financing constraints post shock, borrower composition shifts toward larger and less risky firms, and loans exhibit higher collateralization rates. Our analysis highlights the value of relationships and suggests that relationship banking is a channel through which borrowers can mitigate lending-channel effects.

We investigate the effects of target initiation in M&As. We find target-initiated deals are common and that important motives for these deals are target economic weakness, financial constraints, and negative economy-wide shocks. We determine that average takeover premia, target abnormal returns around merger announcements, and deal value to EBITDA multiples are significantly lower in target-initiated deals. This gap is not explained by weak target financial conditions. Adjusting for self-selection, we conclude that target managers’ private information is a major driver of lower premia in target-initiated deals. This gap widens as information asymmetry between merger partners rises.

We use a proprietary data set to test the implications of several asymmetric information models on how short-lived private information affects trading strategies and liquidity provision. Our identification rests on information acquisition before analyst recommendations are publicly announced. We provide the first empirical evidence supporting theoretical predictions that early-informed traders “sell the news” after “buying the rumor.” Further, we find distinct profit-taking patterns across different classes of institutions. Uninformed institutions, but not individuals, emerge as de facto liquidity providers to better-informed institutions. Placebo tests confirm that these trading patterns are unique to situations in which some investors have a short-lived informational advantage.

We examine a specific channel through which director connectedness may improve monitoring: financial reporting quality. We find that the connectedness of independent, non-co-opted audit committee members has a positive effect on financial reporting quality and accounting conservatism. The effect is not significant for non-audit committee or co-opted audit committee members. Our results are robust to tests designed to mitigate self-selection. Consistent with connected directors being valuable, the market reacts more negatively to the deaths of highly connected directors than to the deaths of less connected directors. Better connected directors also have better career prospects, suggesting they have greater incentives to monitor.

We study the effect of corporate cultural similarity on merger decisions and outcomes. Using the similarity in firms’ corporate social responsibility characteristics to proxy for cultural similarity, we find that culturally similar firms are more likely to merge. Moreover, these mergers are associated with greater synergies, superior long-run operating performance, and fewer write-offs of goodwill. Our evidence is consistent with the notion that cultural similarity eases post-deal integration. Our results contribute to the literature on the determinants of merger success, provide new evidence on the impact of corporate culture, and offer a new approach to defining firms’ cultural similarity.

After the public outcry over backdating, many firms began scheduling option grants. This eliminates backdating but creates other agency problems: Chief executive officers (CEOs) aware of upcoming option grants have an incentive to temporarily depress stock prices to obtain lower strike prices. We show that some CEOs have manipulated stock prices to increase option compensation, documenting negative abnormal returns before scheduled option grants and positive abnormal returns afterward. These returns are explained by measures of CEOs’ incentives and ability to influence stock prices. We document several mechanisms used to lower stock price, including changing the substance and timing of disclosures.

Pursuing delinquent borrowers requires considerable effort, and creditors may lack the incentive to exert this costly effort in uncompetitive banking sectors. To examine this, we use a uniquely large data set of public and private corporate bankruptcy filings spanning a banking-sector reform that deregulated bank entry across different regions of India. We find that increased banking competition is associated with more firms seeking a stay on assets, a decline in bankruptcy duration, and a shift toward workouts rather than liquidations. The results are consistent with creditors exerting greater effort to pursue delinquent firms and resolve bankruptcies more quickly when competition increases.

Using novel earnings calendar data, we show that firms’ advanced scheduling of earnings announcement dates foreshadows their earnings news. Firms that schedule later-than-expected announcement dates subsequently announce worse news than those scheduling earlier-than-expected announcement dates. Despite scheduling disclosures being observable weeks ahead of earnings announcements, we show that equity markets fail to reflect the information in these disclosures until the announcement itself. By also showing that option markets respond efficiently to volatility-timing information embedded in the same scheduling disclosures, we provide novel evidence that markets fail to react to information about future earnings despite investors immediately trading on the underlying signal.