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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We identify the power of institutional blockholders to influence management using previous occurrences of forced CEO turnover at other firms in the blockholders' overall portfolio. We create a “powerful blockholder linkage” measure that strongly predicts future forced CEO turnover. These...

I examine whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US is a learning organization (i.e., one that is capable of learning and adaptation to the dynamic nature of the securities markets – the subject of the SEC's regulatory oversight). Using the treatment of public corporate...

We document that in M&As a significant proportion of targets' equity is owned by financial institutions that simultaneously own targets' bonds (“dual holders”). Targets with larger equity ownership by dual holders have lower M&A equity premia and larger abnormal bond returns, particularly...