Which journal articles have had the most impact on finance research? Which articles were most cited in each of the last 30 years? Which journals dominated finance research in the 1990s? Did any finance sub-discipline stand out or lag behind in the 1990s? We answer these and similar questions...

This paper shows that stock market liquidity is an important determinant of the cost of raising external capital. Using 2,387 seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) from 1993-2000, we find that, after controlling for other factors, investment banks charge lower fees to firms with more liquid stocks....

We investigate investment bank gross spreads for Hong Kong IPOs during 1991-2000 and find pronounced clustering - nearly 94 percent have spreads of exactly 2.5 percent. This clustering is invariant to issue size and decreases through time. We find that SEO spreads cluster as well - at 2.0...

Chen and Ritter (2000) show that it is customary in the investment banking industry to charge a gross spread of seven percent for underwriting a moderately-sized firm-commitment initial public offering. However, in a nontrivial number of IPOs, the spread differs from this standard. We examine...

Using several different methodologies, we quantify the statistical robustness of variables used in prior research to explain initial IPO returns. We establish a parsimonious list of robust variables and evaluate their implications for different theories of IPO underpricing and clustering....

Both market timing and investment-based theories of corporate financing predict underperformance after firms raise capital, but only market timing predicts that the composition of financing (equity compared to debt) should also forecast returns. In cross-sectional tests, we find that the amount...

We study the relation between access to finance and productivity. Our contribution to the literature is a clean identification of a causal effect of access to finance on productivity. Specifically, we exploit an exogenous shift in demand for a product to expose how producers adapt their...

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...