Distressed firms and the banks that lend to these firms often have conflicting interests when going through the Chapter 11 process, freefall bankruptcy vs prepack bankruptcy. We examine whether common ownership, i.e., an institution with holdings in both the borrowing and the lending firms,...

Permanent or long-term large shareholders have different governance incentives and mechanisms from institutional investors. Liquidity could facilitate either cutting and running by large shareholders or, alternatively, increased monitoring. Using an exogenous shock to liquidity in China, we...

Prior research has often taken the view that entrenched managers tend to avoid debt. Contrary to this view, we find that firms with entrenched managers, as measured by the Gompers et al. (2003) governance index, use more debt finance and have higher leverage ratios. To address the potential...

We augment the LLSV creditor rights index with a new “restructuring index” that measures the incentives provided to creditors to grant concessions outside formal bankruptcy. We study the joint impact of the two indexes on a firm's leverage policy. We show that the two indexes have at most a...

The effect of corporate governance may depend on a firm's financial slack. On one hand, financial slack may be spent by managers for their private benefits; a high level is likely associated with severe agency conflicts. Thus corporate governance matters more for high financial slack firms...

How does bank integration affect the market for corporate control for nonfinancial firms? We provide causal evidence that interstate bank deregulation affects acquisitions mainly through reducing the information asymmetry between acquirers and targets, instead of increased credit supply. After...

We investigate the effect of shareholder litigation risk on corporate culture. We measure corporate culture by a novel machine learning metric following Li et al. (2021). Exploiting exogenous declines in shareholder litigation rights and derivative lawsuit risk following the staggered adoption...

We investigate the effect of fiduciary duty of loyalty on corporate culture measured by a novel machine learning approach. We apply a difference-in-differences method exploiting the staggered adoption of the Corporate Opportunity Waiver (COW) law in the U.S. states as an exogenous decline in the...