The paper investigates whether and how a state's local corruption environment affects firms' financing costs. We find that firms in high-corruption states are associated with significantly higher loan spreads and tighter loan covenants. We use an instrumental variable approach and a...

Using a sample of 279 upgrades and 310 downgrades from 1996 to 2004, we find that bond rating changes affect asymmetric information of stock trading and other measures of information risk. More specifically, when a firm's bond rating is upgraded (downgraded), its stock information asymmetry and...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of legal protection of investors and the equity-financing channel on the relationship between corporate investment and stock prices in an international setting. We find that firms in countries with stronger legal protection of investors have investments...

This study examines how uncertainty affects corporate capital investment and how managerial flexibility influences this effect. Our evidence is consistent with the prediction of real options theory on investment. Specifically, we find that firms that face more uncertain future environment...

In this paper, we investigate the relation between accounting accruals and abnormal corporate investments and if the accrual-based anomaly documented by Sloan (1996) is distinct from the investment-based anomaly documented by Titman, Wei, and Xie (2004). Our results indicate that abnormal...

We show that E[Xxg(Y1, .., Yn)] (where E[.] is the expectation operator) can be decomposed into a product of two expected values plus a sum of n co-movement terms, if X, Y1, ..., Yn follow a distribution that admits linear conditional expectation (LCE). We then apply this relation to show that...

Japanese stock returns are even more closely related to their book-to-market ratios than are their U.S. counterparts, and thus provide a good setting for testing whether the return premia associated with these characteristics arise because the characteristics are proxies for covariance with...

We examine the value and efficiency of analyst recommendations through the lens of capital market anomalies. We find that analysts do not fully use the information in anomaly signals when making recommendations. Specifically, analysts tend to give more favorable consensus recommendations to...

To maximize firm value managers must efficiently invest new capital. This paper examines whether analyst coverage impacts a firm's investment efficiency. Using broker mergers and closures as exogenous shocks to the number of analysts covering a firm we find that firm investment efficiency...

Economic policy uncertainty (EPU) increases the cost of raising equity capital, especially when the economy is weak. A one standard deviation increase in the EPU index developed by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) is associated with a 43 basis point increase in the price discount of seasoned...