Employing the staggered short-sale deregulation on the Chinese stock market as quasi-exogenous shocks, we find that short selling threats is associated with higher corporate default risk, especially for firms that are more financially constrained, with higher growth rates, and higher information...

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...

How do firms vary their capital investment and financing policies in response to business cycle fluctuations within their industry? To address this question, we use the regime-switching approach to compute the quarterly time-series of the probability of a future industry downturn for industry...

In this paper, we examine the relation between innovation and a firm's financial dependence using a sample of privately-held and publicly-traded U.S. firms. We find that public firms in external finance dependent industries spend more on R&D and generate a better patent portfolio than their...

We construct a model to show that predatory strategies by a financially strong rival can cause a financially weak firm to underinvest. This threat intensifies when the two firms produce similar products and share similar future investment opportunities. We show that cash holdings become more...

Using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded nonfinancial firms over the last century, we show that U.S. federal government debt issuance significantly affects corporate financial policies and balance sheets through its impact on investors' portfolio...

We derive and develop a simple and intuitive model that shines fresh light on the relentless debate over whether corporate ownership converges to the Berle-Means modern corporation with high stock ownership dispersion. Our model takes into account the importance of both protective legal...

We study how financing constraints affect the cash holdings of small and mediumsized enterprises. There has been little empirical work on this topic, even though these firms often face financial constraints. We contribute by using detailed data on credit ratings in Sweden as a measure of...