We analyze how the adoption of the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), which limits buying or selling consumer data, heterogeneously affects firms with and without previously gathered data on consumers. Exploiting a novel and hand-collected data set of 11,436 conversational-AI firms with...

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...

Unemployment insurance (UI) policies are implemented by many countries to lower individual income risk and to automatically stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations. To the extent that these policies are successful, however, they should be reducing precautionary savings and hence bank deposits –...

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 want to assess the relationship between the equity and the debt cost of capital. Using a very simple dividend discount model we compute the implied discount rate and we compare it with the corresponding premium on the corporate credit default swap using a cointegration approach. We...

Cooper and Nyborg (2008) derive a tax-adjusted discount rate formula under a constant proportion leverage policy, investor taxes and risky debt. However, their analysis assumes zero recovery in default. We extend their framework to allow for positive recovery rates. We also allow for differences...

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...

We use a survey approach to learn about valuation professionals' choices and implementations of valuation techniques in practice. The survey design allows us to control for a respondent's professional subgroup (e.g., consulting), education, experience, and valuation purpose characteristics. We...

I show that an asset pricing model for the equity claims of a value-maximizing firm can be constructed from its optimal financial contracting behavior. I study a dynamic contracting model in which firms trade off the costs and benefits of a given promise to pay external lenders in a specific...

We consider an economy populated by CARA investors who trade, accounting for their price impact, multiple risky assets with arbitrary distributed payoffs. We propose a constructive solution method: finding the equilibrium reduces to solving a linear ordinary differential equation. With market...