We explore the forces that drive cash savings in equity issuance using the average cash-savings rate instead of the marginal cash-savings rate that overstates individual issuers’ cash savings. Equity issuers with high investment opportunities save more cash in anticipation of greater cash...

Share repurchases have become persistent. Firms use cash flow as the primary source of capital to finance repeated share repurchases. This internal financing increases (decreases) retained earnings (paid-in-capital) in the capital structure and weakens the sensitivity of investment to cash flow....

We examine the influence of political rights on the implied cost of equity capital using a sample of firms from 44 countries. We find that firms' equity financing costs are lower when political rights are stronger. We further find that political institutions' direct impact on the cost of equity...

Using a large sample of 115,534 firm-year observations from 46 countries over the period 1992 to 2007, we investigate the impact of political institutions on firms’ growth. We find that high levels of political constraint spur firms’ growth and that this positive impact is more pronounced in...

Using unique data on TSX Attributed Trading and a new proxy of Tobin’s Q that accounts for intangible capital (Peters and Taylor, 2017), we investigate the impact of anonymous trading (AT) on managers’ ability to obtain informative feedback from the stock market to improve investment...

We examine whether a firm’s operating inflexibility affects its carbon footprint. Using a large sample of firms from 30 countries over the 2003–2021 period, we provide first evidence that operating inflexibility reduces firms’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The negative effect of...

In this article, we examine the effects of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on insider trading. Two hypotheses predict that EPU is positively related to insider trading volume and profitability: (1) the private benefits hypothesis, which states that insiders exploit their information advantage...

We examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the cost of equity capital for a large sample of U.S. firms. Using several approaches to estimate firms' ex ante cost of equity, we find that firms with better CSR rankings exhibit cheaper equity financing. In particular, our...

We analyze the importance of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) monitoring to equity pricing in U.S. public firms. Our evidence from large samples implies that equity financing is cheaper when the probability of an IRS audit is higher, enabling investors to learn more about the firm. Reflecting its...

For a large sample of 48 countries, we find robust evidence that strong creditor rights are associated with low long-term leverage across countries. We further find that strong creditor protection lowers long-term debt issuance, the extent to which investments are financed with long-term debt,...