We study how ownership structure, in particular public listing status, relates to workplace safety and productivity tradeoffs. Theory offers competing hypotheses on how listing-related frictions affect these tradeoffs. We exploit detailed asset-level data in the U.S. coal industry and find that...

Corporate cash holdings impact firms' product pricing strategies. Exploiting the Aviation Investment and Reform Act of the 21st Century as a quasi-natural experiment to identify exogenous shocks to competition in the airline industry, I find that firms with more cash than their rivals respond to...

Product price risk is a potentially important factor for firms' liquidity management. A natural place to evaluate the impact of this risk on liquidity management is the electricity industry, since producing firms face substantial price volatility in wholesale markets. Empirically, higher...

I study the empirical importance of debt overhang using a unique dataset on resource extraction firms, which provides ex ante measures of investment opportunities and important variation in the terms of a firm's obligations. In particular, unsecured reclamation liabilities create overhang that...

An increasing fraction of firms worldwide operate in multiple countries. We study the costs and benefits of being multinational in firms' corporate financial decisions and survey the related academic evidence. We document that, among U.S. publicly traded firms, the prevalence of multinationals...

We show that a large number of firms adopt poison pills during periods of market turmoil. In particular, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, many firms adopted poison pills in response to declines in valuations, and stock prices increased upon their announcements. This increase is driven...

Analyzing hand-collected credit agreements data for a random sample of middle-market firms during 2010-2015, we find that a third of all loans is extended directly by nonbank financial intermediaries. Nonbanks lend to less profitable and more levered firms that undergo larger changes in size...

While there is widespread concern that target CEO retention by a private equity acquirer can result in a lower premium for target shareholders because of the potential conflict of interest of the CEO, it is also possible that target shareholders could benefit from CEO retention because it can...

As firms have more assets in place, more of management's limited attention is focused on managing assets in place rather than developing new growth options. Consequently, as firms grow older, they have fewer growth options and a lower ability to generate new growth options. This simple theory...

We analyze a comprehensive sample of more than 10,000 U.S. OTC stocks. We first show that the OTC market is a large, diverse, and dynamic trading environment with a rich set of regulatory and disclosure regimes, comprising venue rules and state laws beyond SEC regulation. We then exploit this...