We show firms pay more dividends and repurchase more shares when they have higher levels of institutional ownership, even if the institutions are not activist investors. We also find evidence of an effect of institutional ownership on proxy voting, profitability, R&D, and CEO compensation. Our...

We use a regulatory experiment (Regulation SHO) that relaxes short-selling constraints on a random sample of US stocks to test whether capital market frictions have an effect on stock prices and corporate decisions. We find that an increase in short-selling activity causes prices to fall, and...

We test the hypothesis that investment banking networks affect stock prices and trading behavior. Consistent with the notion that investment banks serve as information hubs for segmented groups of investors, the stock prices of firms that use the same lead underwriter during their equity...

Investment spending by US public firms is highly concentrated. The 100 largest spenders account for 60% of total capital expenditures and drive most of the variation in aggregate US investment. This high concentration creates a disconnect between the average public firm and macroeconomic...

We provide evidence of discrimination in auto lending. Combining credit bureau records with borrower characteristics, we find that Black and Hispanic applicants' loan approval rates are 1.5 percentage points lower, even controlling for creditworthiness. In aggregate, discrimination crowds out...

Corporate dividends cluster on increments of 5, like 25, 50, and 75. Firms that pay dividends on these `prominent' amounts have lower operating performance and five-factor alphas 60 b.p. per year lower. Consistent with agency frictions that reduce managerial effort and lead to lazy decisions, we...

We find that business cycles drive productive economic churn. During recessions, firms with high previous abnormal investment scale back while firms with low abnormal investment scale up. These findings are consistent with an improvement in investment efficiency over the business cycle. Our...

This paper presents empirical evidence that the recent rise in idiosyncratic risk is driven by the increasing propensity of firms to issue public equity at an earlier stage in their life cycle. We find that the age of the typical firm at its IPO date has fallen dramatically from nearly 40 years...

This paper shows that, contrary to existing evidence, corporate managers cannot successfully time the maturity of their debt issues to reduce their cost of capital. Our results indicate that the negative correlation between future excess long-term bond returns and the ratio of long-term debt...

This paper presents empirical evidence that stock market liquidity is an important determinant of the cost of raising external capital. Because the role of an investment banking syndicate in a public security offering is analogous to that of a block trader, investment banks should charge lower...