A recent dramatic rise in the assets managed by passive corporate debt funds has profound implications for firm financing and payout policy. I use fund-specific flows to isolate exogenous increases in firm-level passive debt ownership at a firm. Firms respond to higher levels of passive debt...

In a three-period model with active and passive external corporate governance, this paper studies the endogenous decision of debt and equity financiers on the governance mode and intensity over their debtors, as well as how this may affect the funded firms' financing choice. We show that debt...

The tax laws of most developed countries are debt biased since firms can deduct interest on debt but not on equity. This bias is known to distort investment decisions. However, less is known about how the debt tax shield affects the ownership of assets when bidders differ financial expertise and...

The corporate governance literature has shown that self-interested controlling owners tend to divert corporate resources for private benefits at the expense of other shareholders. Such behavior leads the controlling owners to prefer long maturity debt to short maturity debt, to avoid frequent...

In this paper, I study the inclusion of cost savings and synergy add-backs (cost-synergy add-backs hereafter) in loan contracts. Such add-backs allow borrowers to add unrealized cost savings and synergy gains into contractual earnings calculations and thus reflect timely gain recognition in debt...

Leveraged buyouts allow for a separate identification of sponsor reputation and underlying firm quality and their effects on capital structure choices. In 616 U.S. LBOs for which we can reconstruct financing activity, we find that the average LBO issues an average of 1.16 additional debt...

This paper studies whether debt renegotiation mitigates debt overhang and improves investment efficiency. Using mergers between lenders participated in the same syndicated loans as natural experiments that exogenously reduce the number of lenders and thus make renegotiation easier, I find that...

Analyzing data from approximately 1.5 million employees across 1,108 established public and private US companies, we find that employee beliefs about their firm's purpose is weaker in public companies. This difference is most pronounced within the salaried middle and hourly ranks, rather than...

Existing studies show that common institutional ownership of multiple industry firms improves governance over management, because such common owners possess industry-wide information advantage and governance expertise. This paper studies whether creditors perceive common owners as allied...

Scholars and antitrust enforcers have raised concerns about anticompetitive effects that may arise when institutional investors hold substantial stakes in competing firms. Their concern rests on empirical evidence that such common concentrated ownership is associated with higher prices and lower...