Competitors engage in product market predation when they lower prices or increase expenditures on non-price competition with the goal of forcing a rival to exit. This study provides evidence consistent with the hypothesis that financially constrained firms avoid financial statement disclosure to mitigate the risk of product ...

This paper studies the relationship between institutional investor holdings and misvalued stocks over the last three decades in the U.S. equity market. Using multiple proxies of stock mispricings, I find that institutional investors overweigh overvalued and underweigh undervalued stocks in their portfolio, taking the market ...

Extant evidence of acquirers' post-merger underperformance is often viewed as support for the behavioral theory of mergers that investors overvalue acquirers during the pre-acquisition period. Motivated by recent developments in asset pricing, which show that firms' expected returns and investment rates are negatively related, ...

This essay analyzes the potential real economic effects of a feedback mechanism on firms' real investment and financing policies. Using a matched sample method with option-listed firms between 1973 and 2009, I document some evidence consistent with the presence of the feedback effect described in Goldstein and Geumbel (2008).

Previous literature on payout policy has focused on the effects of firm-level characteristics on firms' dividend payouts or stock repurchases. My dissertation investigates whether industry characteristics affect these payout decisions. The first chapter focuses on effects of strategic interaction between firms in product ...

This paper studies the currency choice of government and public agency borrowers when they issue bonds in the international market. In particular, by constructing a comprehensive sample of global bonds issued by these issuers between 1999 and 2011, I find strong evidence that they choose their issuance currency in response ...

This paper studies the agency costs of debt and the role of risk shifting as firms face financial distress. The Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program is a novel setting to evaluate the importance of these costs. It provides participating venture capital funds with debt financing from the U.S. government at a ...

The first chapter of my dissertation examines the effect of similarity in personal characteristics between start-up executives and investor principals on whether the start-up obtains funding from the investor, as well as the success of the start-ups. I find that while similarities in educational background, ethnicity, and ...

My dissertation focuses on the effect of financial market frictions on firm value in the context of corporate mergers, capital structure and growth. The first chapter explores how financing frictions faced by potential buyers of industry specific real assets affect the transaction value of merger targets that consist of such ...

I find that a CEO who is better monitored tends to have smaller total contractual incentive pay, measured by the delta of the CEO's total portfolio. The realized wealth-to-performance sensitivity (WPS) of such a CEO, however, is not significantly different from that of a CEO who is worse monitored. The findings suggest that ...