In contrast to bonds, cov-lite loans do not require SEC registration and are not subject to securities laws. We show that this distinction plays an important role in firms' choice between funding through cov-lite loans and bonds and helps understand why the market share of cov-lite loans has...

From 2010 to 2021, 639 US VC-funded firms achieved unicorn status. We investigate why there are so many unicorns and why controlling shareholders give investors privileges to obtain unicorn status. We show that unicorns rely more than other VC-funded firms on organizational capital as well as...

Following surprise independent director departures, affected firms have worse stock and operating performance, are more likely to restate earnings, face shareholder litigation, suffer from an extreme negative return event, and make worse mergers and acquisitions. The announcement returns to...

We examine the determinants of appointments of outside CEOs to boards and how these appointments impact the appointing companies. We find that CEOs are most likely to join boards of large established firms that are geographically close, pursue similar financial and investment policies, and have...

Firms with greater financial flexibility should be better able to fund a revenue shortfall resulting from the COVID-19 shock and benefit less from policy responses. We find that firms with high financial flexibility within an industry experience a stock price drop lower by 26% or 9.7 percentage...

Analyzing hand-collected credit agreements data for a random sample of middle-market firms during 2010-2015, we find that a third of all loans is extended directly by nonbank financial intermediaries. Nonbanks lend to less profitable and more levered firms that undergo larger changes in size...

From 1991 to 2006, U.S. stocks are more volatile than stocks of similar foreign firms. A firm's stock return volatility in a country can be higher than the stock return volatility of a similar firm in another country for reasons that contribute positively (good volatility) or negatively (bad...

Using a large panel of firms across the world from 1991-2006, we show that the median foreign firm has lower idiosyncratic risk than a comparable U.S. firm. Country characteristics help explain variation in the level of idiosyncratic risk, but less so than firm characteristics. Idiosyncratic...

Though overall bank performance from July 2007 to December 2008 was the worst since at least the Great Depression, there is significant variation in the cross-section of stock returns of large banks across the world during that period. We use this variation to evaluate the importance of factors...

During the financial crisis, corporate borrowing and capital expenditures fall sharply. Most existing research links the two phenomena by arguing that a shock to bank lending (or more generally to the corporate credit supply) caused a reduction in capital expenditures. The economic significance...