In this thesis, I investigate economic and policy implications of corporate debt financing. In the first chapter, I examine whether or not leverage has a negative effect on corporate investment due to a debt overhang problem. Existing empirical studies face a challenging endogeneity problem...

Can the product diversification strategy of a firm provide a natural hedge against adverse economic conditions? We use a quasi-natural experiment to show that diversification attenuates the detrimental impact of unanticipated economic disruptions and enables diversified firms to invest more...

We use a sample of democratic firms (with 5 or less anti-takeover provisions) from the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) database and use idiosyncratic volatility as a proxy for information from the market of corporate control as in Ferreira and Laux (2007) to link the equity...

This study examines the relationship between the cost of public bonds and corporate social responsibility. We use firms added to the KLD 400 Index, a stock index of corporate social responsibility, and find that these firms have a significantly higher yield spread following inclusion to the...

This paper examines the cross-listings by Chinese companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the U.S. markets from 1993 to 2005. Our sample consists of 101 firms cross-listed in Hong Kong, 43 firms in the U.S. and 77 firms in Singapore and a sample of 1,247 domestic listings. We find that the...