The paper examines whether financially constrained firms are able to use acquisitions to ease their constraints. The results show that acquisitions do ease financing constraints for constrained acquirers. Relative to unconstrained acquires, financially constrained firms are more likely to use...

Study of the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on productivity and market power has been complicated by the difficulty of separating these two effects. We use newly-developed techniques to separately estimate productivity and markups across a wide range of industries using detailed...

Theory predicts that "common ownership" (ownership of rivals by a common shareholder) can be anticompetitive because it reduces the weight firms place on their own profits and shifts weight toward rival firms held by common shareholders. In this paper we use accounting data from the banking...

We use exchange-traded options to identify risks relevant to capital structure adjustments in firms. These forward-looking market-based risk measures provide significant explanatory power in predicting net leverage changes in excess of accounting data. They matter most during contractionary...

We find that ownership by different types of institutional investor has different implications for future firm misvaluation and governance characteristics. Dedicated institutional investors decrease future firm misvaluation relative to fundamentals, as well as the magnitude of this misvaluation....

We find that firms located in areas with higher intergenerational mobility are more profitable. Building off the work of Chetty and Hendren (2018a and 2018b)—who provide measures of intergenerational mobility for all commuting zones (essentially, metropolitan areas) within the U.S.—we are...

Using data from U.S. corporate tax returns, which provide a sample representative of the universe of U.S. corporations, we investigate the differential investment propensities of public and private firms. Re-weighting the data to generate observationally comparable sets of public and private...