This thesis presents two essays in Corporate Finance. In the first essay, I use the August 2007 crisis episode to gauge the effect of financial contracting on real firm behavior. I identify heterogeneity in financial contracting at the onset of the crisis by exploiting ex-ante variation in...

I find that the total asset (TA) growth anomaly (Cooper et al. 2008) is a noisy manifestation of the net operating asset (NOA) growth anomaly documented earlier in the accounting literature. To better understand the underlying causes of the growth anomalies, I decompose TA growth into NOA growth...

In the first chapter of this dissertation, entitled “Signaling and Value Creation in Mergers,” I analyze the acquirers in both withdrawn and completed merger deals to disentangle the effects of signaling from those of target valuation and expected synergies. Completed stock (cash) acquirers...