Consistent with asymmetric information arguments, prior research has shown that the financial market typically responds negatively to the announcement of a seasoned equity offering (SEO). Korajczyk and Levy (2003), however, suggest that while some firms time the issuance of their common stock to...

We study the effect of ownership structure on the informativeness of a firm's earnings as capitalized in stock prices and returns. We hypothesize that informativeness of earnings is decreasing in dual class ownership structure due to purported higher agency costs at dual class firms compared to...

Why do firms deviate from a one share-one vote regime when going public? We consider three arguments for this choice. Examining data on U.S. IPOs from 1980 through 2008, we do not find that firms that go public with dual class stock so managers have more incentive to invest in hard to monitor...

Theoretical research argues that convertible bonds mitigate the contracting costs of moral hazard, adverse selection, and financial distress. Using firm-specific and macroeconomic factors of the contracting costs, we examine the extent to which they impact the likelihood of issuance and the...

We analyze whether fluctuation in economy-wide factors cause time-series variation in the contracting costs of moral hazard, adverse selection, and financial distress, and so create windows of opportunity for firms to issue debt. Using the announcement period abnormal returns as one measure of...

In this paper, we study how the announcement returns of convertible bonds change for different issues in a sequence for firms in various sectors of the economy. We show that industrial firms obtain significantly lower returns in later issues of convertible bonds compared to former issues. In...

In this paper, we study the long-run operating performance of preferred stock issuers. We use three different measures of operating performance; pre-tax cash flows, profit margin and return on assets. We study the performance of industrial firms, financial firms, and utilities separately, as well...

This paper examines the influence of bond design on the long-run operating performance of convertible bond issuers and the determinants of this performance. Bonds are classified as equity-like and debt-like according to their probability of conversion at the time of the issue. The measure of...

We examine the impact of macroeconomic and firm-specific factors on the likelihood of issuance and the structure of convertible bonds. Consistent with convertibles mitigating financial distress and contracting costs, our results indicate that the likelihood of issuing convertible bonds compared...