Institutional investors conduct more governance research and are less likely to follow proxy advisor vote recommendations when a company's bonds comprise a larger share of their assets. These findings are driven by bond holdings, shareholder proposals, and companies where fixed-income managers...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, real-world firm managers consistently say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take firm managers...

For many firms, the acquisition process begins with the development of an acquisition plan that is communicated to investors. We construct a comprehensive sample of acquisition plans to provide novel perspectives on the acquisition process and find that acquisition plans are informative to...

During project development, costs are endogenously determined through delegated bargaining with counterparties. In surveys, nearly 80% of CFOs report using an elevated hurdle rate, the implications of which we explore in a delegated bargaining model. We show that elevated hurdle rates can convey...

Institutional investors are less likely to support shareholder proposals involving environmental and social issues for firms headquartered in Republican-led states. The lower support concentrates in recent years, when politicians became more vocal about firms' social responsibility activities,...

We use unique firm-level data from Mexico to document that non-financial corporations engage in carry trades by borrowing in foreign currency (FX) and lending in domestic currency, largely in the form of trade credit, accumulating currency risk in the process. We show at a quarterly frequency...

Using firm-level administrative tax data on the 43% of business liabilities in the United States tied to privately held firms, we document dramatic reductions in leverage since the Great Recession. Leverage for the average private firm fell fifteen percent between 2004 and 2018. In contrast,...

We examine the optimal financing of infrastructure when governments have limited financial commitment and can expropriate rents from private sector firms that manage infrastructure. While private firms need incentives to implement projects well, governments need incentives to limit...

One of the most consequential events in any firm's lifetime is a major acquisition. Because of their importance, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been an enormous area of research. However, the vast majority of this research and survey papers summarizing this research have focused on...

China's admission into the WTO in 2001 heralded a new era of globalization, increasing both import competition in domestic markets and foreign opportunities for US firms. In the aggregate, the average annual profitability of US public firms during the post globalization period (2003-2019)...