We show that CEOs exhibit a hometown bias in acquisitions. Firms are over twice as likely to acquire targets located in the states of their CEOs' childhood homes than similar targets domiciled elsewhere. Small, private home-state deals underperform other small, private deals, and the bias is...

We posit that IPOs of local companies will lead to increased stock market participation. First, local IPOs attract attention to the market, through both increased information production and publicity. Second, local IPOs generate wealth, not just for people associated with the heretofore private...

Beginning in 2012, private equity (PE) fund advisers must register with the SEC and disclose information regarding misconduct committed by the advisers or their affiliates. We find that the disclosure of misconduct reduces PE fund advisers’ ability to raise future funds. Among different types...

We examine whether climate-change risk affects firms' cost of capital when firms canadapt to the risk. We find firms' cost of long-term loans increases with sea level rise(SLR) risk, but this effect mainly holds among firms with high adjustment costs to therisk, i.e., firms for whom it is hard...

We document that a firm's culture — specifically, its religiosity — affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions....

We study CEO compensation in the banking industry by considering banks' unique claim structure in the presence of two types of agency problems: the standard managerial agency problem and the risk-shifting problem between shareholders and debt holders. We empirically test two hypotheses derived...

We perform transaction-level analyses of entrusted loans—one of the largest components of shadow banking in China. Entrusted loans involve firms with privileged access to cheap capital channeling funds to less privileged firms, and increase when credit is tight. Nonaffiliated loans have much...

By studying the only mandatory pre-IPO market in the world – Taiwan's Emerging Stock Market (ESM), we document that pre-market prices are very informative about post-market prices and that the informativeness increases with a stock's liquidity. The ESM price-earnings ratio shortly before the...

Using a unique dataset of dealer-level trading data in bookbuilding IPOs, we find strong evidence that lead underwriter trades in IPO firms are significantly related to subsequent IPO abnormal returns. This relation is concentrated among issues in which underwriters' information advantage is...