We review recent evidence and future directions for empirical research on financial contracting in the context of corporate finance. Specifically, we survey evidence pertaining to incentive conflicts, control rights, collateral, renegotiation, and interactions between financial contracts and...

Much of empirical corporate finance focuses on sources of the demand for various forms of capital, not the supply. Recently, this has changed. Supply effects of equity and credit markets can arise from a combination of three ingredients: investor tastes, limited intermediation, and corporate...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has...

This review describes several important recent advances in the measurement of the performance of actively managed portfolios. For returns-based performance evaluation, we discuss several innovations, such as conditional performance evaluation, Bayesian approaches, and a new multiple-testing...

This article provides a review of the rapidly developing literature on investment performance evaluation. The goals are to summarize the significant forces and contributions that have brought this field of research to its current state of knowledge and to suggest directions for future research....

Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. However, although discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms...

Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the assets of the firm. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the...

This article reviews the rich and vast literature on defined-benefit (DB) corporate pension plans. The analysis of how firms react to the taxation and regulation of pension plans and to the guarantees provided by the government has allowed researchers to test alternative corporate finance...