This dissertation is composed of two distinct chapters. The first chapter is concerned with the secular trends in corporate cash holdings and the determinants of the changing cash policies for seven industrialized countries--Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the US, and UK. In the first...

We present empirical evidence on acquirer firms that have violated or are about to violate a loan covenant within four quarters of undergoing an acquisition. We find that firms that violate a covenant within the four quarters before the acquisition announcement have the highest announcement...

In this paper, I investigate the logic behind cross sectional dispersion of firm's capital structure. I incorporate the trade off between tax benefits and financial distress costs into a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and their endogenous entry/exit, and compute an...

My dissertation aims at understanding the financing and investment decisions of firms. It contains two chapters.Chapter One studies the currency composition of debt for firms in emerging economies. Using a dataset of traded Mexican firms, I document two stylized facts about firms in the...

Greater instability in a country's list of top corporations is associated with faster economic growth. This faster growth is primarily due to faster growth in total factor productivity in industrialized countries, and faster capital accumulation in developing countries. These findings are...

This paper examines time-series patterns of external financing decisions and shows that publicly traded U.S, firms fund a much larger proportion of their financing deficit with external equity when the cost of equity capital is low. The historical values of the cost of equity capital have...

With the appropriate framework to shape financial knowledge, the management accounting function should become an organization's principal decision-support platform. The framework consists of six levels of financial knowledge, and the word "financial" is most operative here. The Level 1 knowledge...

We provide an empirical support for theories of lender specialization using the recently developed market for Debtor-in-Possession (DIP) financing. The legal environment in which DIP financing operates represents a natural laboratory for testing determinants of lending specialization (e.g....

Value-based management systems focus on wealth and the wealth creation process and promote the generation of value for the shareholders. A valuation model for the firm is extended analytically to focus explicitly on profitability, growth, and capital intensity as drivers of the value of the...

Using data from 944 public companies in 2006, I examine how a firm''s propensity to pay dividends is related to (i) board independence and (ii) independent directors'' tenure, number of board seats (busy) and equity incentive compensation. After controlling for the effects of traditional...