This study examines the allocation of cash proceeds following 400 subsidiary sales between 1990 and 1998. Retention probabilities are increasing in the divesting firm's contemporaneous growth opportunities and expected investment. Retaining firms, however, also systematically overinvest relative...

The average cash-to-assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms more than doubles from 1980 to 2006. A measure of the economic importance of this increase is that at the end of the sample period, the average firm can retire all debt obligations with its cash holdings. Cash ratios increase because...

Spot power prices are volatile and since electricity cannot be economically stored, familiar arbitrage-based methods are not applicable for pricing power derivative contracts. This paper presents an equilibrium model implying that the forward power price is a downward biased predictor of the...

We develop a new model of multimarket trading to explain the differences in the foreign share of trading volume of internationally cross-listed stocks. The model predicts that the trading volume of a cross-listed stock is proportionally higher on the exchange in which the cross-listed asset...

We find that the majority of variation in leverage ratios is driven by an unobserved time-invariant effect that generates surprisingly stable capital structures: High (low) levered firms tend to remain as such for over two decades. This feature of leverage is largely unexplained by previously...

We use a sample of 800 firms in eight East Asian countries to study the effect of ownership structure on value during the region's financial crisis. The crisis negatively impacted firms' investment opportunities, raising the incentives of controlling shareholders to expropriate minority...

We analyze several hundred firms that expand via acquisition and/or increase their number of business segments. The combined market reaction to acquisition announcements is positive but acquiring firm excess values decline after the diversifying event. Much of the excess value reduction occurs...

This paper examines the relationship between book-to-market equity, distress risk, and stock returns. Among firms with the highest distress risk as proxied by Ohlson's (1980) O-score, the difference in returns between high and low book-to-market securities is more than twice as large as that in...

We provide evidence that corporate tax status is endogenous to financing decisions, which induces a spurious relation between measures of financial policy and many commonly used tax proxies. Using a forward-looking estimate of "before-financing" corporate marginal tax rates, we document a...