Recently, there has been explosive growth in two products from the hedge fund industry - multi-strategy (MS) funds and funds of hedge funds (FOFs), both of which offer diversification across different hedge fund strategies. In well-functioning markets, both investment vehicles should offer...

The extant literature on trade credit emphasizes its financing role wherein financially sound firms provide trade credit to ease the credit constraints of weaker trading partners. We offer an alternative, though not mutually exclusive, perspective in which trade credit serves as a commitment...

The key insight from the seminal work by Modigliani and Miller (1958) is that market imperfections are necessary for financial decisions such as the debt vs. equity to impact firm value. When firms choose debt finance, they must also decide between public debt (e.g., corporate bonds) and private...

The extant literature on trade credit emphasizes its financing role wherein financially sound firms provide trade credit to ease the credit constraints of weaker trading partners. We offer an alternative, though not mutually exclusive, perspective in which trade credit serves as a commitment...

Mutual funds typically invest a disproportionately large portion of their portfolio in one industry (main industry). We present a simple theoretical model to demonstrate that better mutual fund managers make larger investments in the important supplier/customer industries related to the main...

We analyze how changes in labor market conditions influence the relation between a firm's debt level and employee productivity. We document that better (worse) outside employment opportunities create a more negative (positive) relation between employee productivity and debt at both the firm and...

In this article, we study the effectiveness of promotion-based tournament incentives. We simultaneously investigate tournament incentives for the VP and performance- or equity- based (alignment) incentives for the VP and the CEO. We find that tournament incentives, as measured by the pay...

We track the dividend initiation decisions of a sample of 6,588 firms that went public during the period 1979-2005 and find that 873 of them initiated dividends. Our primary objective is to determine whether information signaling can explain the dividend initiation (DI) decision. We find that...

Theory predicts that since a firm with market power has more stable cash flows because of its ability to set prices in the product market, its stock price is less sensitive to order flow (Peress, 2010), which results in greater stock liquidity. We test this prediction on a large sample of firms...

We investigate the link between a firm's leverage and the characteristics of its suppliers and customers. First, we test the hypothesis that firms use decreased leverage as a commitment mechanism to induce suppliers/customers to undertake relationship-specific investments. We find that the...