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, ...

In the first chapter of my dissertation I ask whether and how debtor protection affects aggregate small business credit quantity. Using comprehensive data on the number and amount of small business loans granted by commercial banks, and employing a robust difference-in-difference empirical design utilizing staggered shocks ...

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 ...

In the first chapter I investigate the effect of the dispersion of institutional shareholders on firm value. By using mergers of institutional investors as exogenous changes to the ownership structure of firms in their portfolios I find that institutional investor monitoring is a complement to monitoring by other institutional ...

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).

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 ...

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 ...