This paper analyzes the financing terms that support international trade and sheds light on how these terms shape the impact of economic shocks on trade. Analysis of transaction-level data from a U.S.-based exporter of frozen and refrigerated food products, primarily poultry, reveals broad...

Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear agency costs and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We show that if equity is overvalued, however, mispricing offsets agency costs...

This paper analyzes the impact on firm behavior of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S. multinationals. The analysis controls for endogeneity and omitted variable bias by using instruments that identify the...

Why do shares in NEC Electronics, a publicly listed subsidiary of Japan conglomerate NEC trade at a discount to their fundamental value? Can Perry Capital, a U.S. hedge fund, restructure this subsidiary and generate significant returns? This case provides students with an opportunity to analyze...

We show empirically that public credit information increases competition in credit markets. We access data that cover all credit card borrowers in Chile and include details about relationship borrowers have with each lender. We exploit a natural experiment whereby a non-bank lender's portfolio...

This paper analyzes dividend remittances by a large panel of foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational firms. The dividend policies of foreign affiliates, which convey no signals to public capital markets, nevertheless resemble those used by publicly held companies in paying dividends to diffuse...

Do firms investing abroad simultaneously reduce their domestic activity? This paper analyzes the relationship between the domestic and foreign operations of American manufacturing firms between 1982 and 2004 by instrumenting for changes in foreign operations with GDP growth rates of the foreign...

Empirical evidence of imperfect integration across world capital markets suggests a role for cross-border arbitrage by multinationals. Consistent with multinational arbitrage as a determinant of foreign direct investment (FDI) patterns, we find that FDI flows increase sharply with source-country...

U.S. corporations hold significant amounts of cash on their balance sheets, and these cash holdings have been justified in the existing empirical literature by transaction costs and precautionary motives. An additional explanation, considered in this study, is that U.S. multinational firms hold...

Political risks increase the volatility of multinational firm operating returns, prompting firms to adjust their capital structures. Politically risky countries feature more volatile returns, and the volatility of a parent company's aggregate foreign returns also increases with the extent of the...