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chapter of this dissertation, entitled “Signaling and Value Creation in Mergers,” I analyze the acquirers in both withdrawn and completed merger deals to disentangle the effects of signaling from those of target valuation and expected synergies.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

The Asia Pacific region's dynamic oil market is marked by strong growth in consumption, declining regional oil production, and over capacity in its highly competitive oil-refining sector. Its "key players" are China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea a group that includes the region's...