Historically a key advantage of being a public firm was broader access to capital, from a disperse group of shareholders. In recent years, such capital has increasingly become available to private firms as well. We document a dramatic increase over the past twenty years in the number of mutual...

We perform transaction-level analyses of entrusted loans—one of the largest components of shadow banking in China. Entrusted loans involve firms with privileged access to cheap capital channeling funds to less privileged firms, and increase when credit is tight. Nonaffiliated loans have much...

Using a unique dataset of dealer-level trading data in bookbuilding IPOs, we find strong evidence that lead underwriter trades in IPO firms are significantly related to subsequent IPO abnormal returns. This relation is concentrated among issues in which underwriters' information advantage is...

We hypothesize that CEO compensation is optimally designed to trade off two types of agency problems: the standard shareholder-management agency problem as well as the risk-shifting problem between shareholders and debtholders. Analyses in this setup produces two predictions: (1) the...

We study CEO compensation in the banking industry by taking into account banks unique claim structure in the presence of two types of agency problems: the standard managerial agency problem as well as the risk-shifting problem between shareholders and debtholders. We empirically test two...

We examine various aspects of the IPO market in China—the policy history, IPO pricing, bids and allocation, and aftermarket trading under two lenses: IPO theories and the unique regulatory environment in China. We show that heavy-handed regulations cause inefficient IPO offer prices and high...

By studying the only mandatory pre-IPO market in the world – Taiwan's Emerging Stock Market (ESM), we document that pre-market prices are very informative about post-market prices and that the informativeness increases with a stock's liquidity. The ESM price-earnings ratio shortly before the...

We analyze IPO activity under political uncertainty surrounding gubernatorial elections in the U.S. There are fewer IPOs originating from a state when it is scheduled to have an election. To establish identification, we develop a neighboring-states method that uses bordering states without...

We show that divestitures accompanying horizontal mergers affect both the market power potential and the competitive efficiency of merging firms. Stock price reactions of customer firms are more positive (hence divestitures are more effective in mitigating the market power impact of the merger)...

We document that the accrual anomaly is substantially mitigated for firms followed by more experienced analysts. We then examine research and monitoring as possible channels through which experience mitigates mispricing. For firms followed by more experienced analysts, we find that forecast...