To what extent do credit lines provide liquidity insurance? We investigate this question using a unique dataset with firms' actual draw-down rates and find that firms draw down their lines of credit at higher rates than the initial contract rates recorded in Dealscan. More importantly, we find...

We examine the role of bilateral political relations on cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. Based on a large sample of cross-border deals during 1990- 2010, we find strong and robust evidence that bilateral political relations have large and significant causal effects on...

We demonstrate theoretically that Bitcoin's limited adoption arises as an equilibrium outcome rather than as a short-lived property. Our results are driven by negative network effects which arise due to Bitcoin's need for consensus and the existence of network delay. As the Bitcoin network...

We find that an increase in a firm's incentives to use trade secrets to protect its intellectual property results in a more actively managed capital structure. Exploiting U.S. states' adoption of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act as a positive “shock” in the protection afforded to trade secrets,...

Firms that file for Chapter 11 are actively traded. This paper investigates who trades these bankrupt firms and why. We also examine the potential pricing impact of this active trading. We find that the unique lottery-like characteristics of bankrupt firms make them attractive to a particular...

This study examines structural shifts in the market for bank control resulting from the court decision of Northeast Bancorp, Inc., et al. v. Board of Governors (1985), and analyze its impact on stock prices and risk incentives in affected banks. The outcome of the case reaffirmed the...

We augment the LLSV creditor rights index with a new “restructuring index” that measures the incentives provided to creditors to grant concessions outside formal bankruptcy. We study the joint impact of the two indexes on a firm's leverage policy. We show that the two indexes have at most a...

Employment protection increases labor adjustment costs and hence the expected costs of financial distress for labor-intensive firms. It follows that these firms are likely to increase their cash holdings to reduce the risk of financial distress when employment protection is strengthened....

We study the effects of country-level creditor protections on the firm-level choice of debt structure. Using data from 46 countries, we show that firms have more concentrated debt structures in countries with stronger creditor protection. Firms choose debt structure concentrations by trading-off...