This article relates corporate credit rating quality to competition in lending between the public bond market and banks. In the model, the monopolistic rating agency's choice of price and quality leads to an endogenous threshold separating low-quality bank-dependent issuers from higher-quality...

Can the freedom to choose how retirement funds are invested leave workers worse off? We analyze social risks of allowing choice, using the Social Security system as an example. Comparing a privatized alternative with the current system via simulation, we document that choice in both equity...

Young firms disproportionately employ young workers, controlling for firm size, industry, geography and time. The same positive correlation between young firms and young employees holds when we look just at new hires. On average, young employees in young firms earn higher wages than young...

To what extent do capital market factors affect home prices? This paper examines quarterly changes in median sales prices for homes across more than 3,000 U.S. ZIP Codes in 203 metropolitan areas from 2001 to 2006 to investigate home price sensitivity to returns on U.S. stocks and bonds. The...

We investigate empirically how investor objectives condition the design of financial contracts as manifest in private investment in public equity (PIPE) deals. We hypothesize that varying objectives among different types of institutional investors affect the observed allocation of cash flow...

Given the frequency and its important value implication of post-IPO M&A activity, we investigate empirically whether investors can utilize information based on IPO deal structure to predict merger and acquisition activity among newly public firms. Consistent with the hypothesis that some firms...

Secondary market stock returns of newly public firms with high levels of institutional investment exceed returns of firms with low institutional investment (Field and Lowry, 2009). We find that a material portion of this performance differential is attributable to institutional investment in...

Firms headquartered in the same U.S. city experience positive comovement in their stock returns, a finding suggestive of local biases in equity trading activity (Pirinsky and Wang, Journal of Finance, 2006). We investigate the robustness of this finding with respect to additional equity pricing...