We use venture-backed initial public offerings (IPOs) to identify and examine the comparative advantage of inexperienced venture capitalists. We argue that, vis-a-vis more established counterparts, younger venture capital firms have a comparative advantage at producing soft information about...

Mutual funds whose managers are in the same educational network as the firm's CEO are more likely to vote against shareholder-initiated proposals to limit executive compensation than out-of-network funds. This voting propensity is stronger when voting among the funds in a family is not...

Previous studies document that the stock returns of bond issuing firms significantly underperform matched peers over the three to five years following issuance. We revisit this phenomenon and show that the underperformance is the result of an omitted return factor (a bad model problem). Debt...

The level of interaction between bond rating agencies and firms they rate varies substantially cross-sectionally. For instance, many bond ratings are solicited by bond issuers, resulting in a relationship between the firm and the rating agencies they hire. But other bond ratings are unsolicited,...

We illustrate the sensitivity of two-way fixed effects difference-indifferences estimates to innocuous changes in data structure. Using the staggered rollout of state-level bank branching deregulations, three outcome variables are brought to bear on the interventions: personal income growth (a...

When local media report news about local companies, they use fewer negative words compared to the same media reporting about non-local companies. We document that one reason for this positive slant is due to the firms' local media advertising expenditures. Abnormal positive local media slant...

Previous studies have found that the share of equity in total new issues (S) is negatively correlated with future equity market returns (in-sample). Researchers have interpreted this finding as evidence that managers are able to predict the systematic component of their stock returns and to...

The notice period given to convertible bondholders affects the optimal call policy for convertible bonds. After accounting for the notice period, convertible bonds in our sample would have been optimally called when the stock was at about an 11% premium (median) relative to the conversion price....