Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...

A common method of valuing the equity in highly leveraged transactions is the flows-to-equity method. When applying this method various formulas can be used to calculate the time-varying cost of equity. In this paper we show that some commonly used formulas are inconsistent with the assumptions...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...

Using novel data on firms' government relations staff, and two distinct empirical settings, we show that political activism enables firms to grow their market power. The documented increases in profit margins and market share persist for up to two years, and are concentrated among large...

Poor corporate governance permits unreliable financial reporting by a firm's management. The AGR governance rating is based on the premise that a more accurate assessment of the effects of corporate governance can be formulated by taking this output of corporate governance into account in...

We use a dynamic model of cash management in which firms face competitive pressure to show that competition increases corporate cash holdings as well as the frequency and size of equity issues. In our model, these effects are driven by small, financially constrained firms, in contrast with the...

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in which corporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show that firms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors using the timing of...

The paper proposes a novel direction to rationalize and quantify investors' flipping behavior and its effect on underpricing in IPOs through the use of a structural approach mode. The outcome is a proxy value that replicates investors' flipping behavior. When tested empirically, the model...

We build a model of endogenous, innovation-driven growth in which innovative firms have costly access to outside financing and hoard cash reserves to maintain financial flexibility. We show that financing frictions slow down Schumpeterian creative destruction by discouraging entry. As a result,...

When innovation is cumulative, patent protection on early inventions can generate holdup problems if later complementary patents are owned by different firms. Consistent with the property rights literature, we show that shareholder ownership overlap across firms with patent complementarities...