Unlike seasoned equity or public debt offerings, bank loan financing elicits a significantly positive announcement return, which has led financial economists to characterize bank loans as “special.” Here, we find that firms announcing bank loans suffer negative abnormal stock returns over the subsequent three years. In the long run, bank loans appear no different from seasoned equity offerings or public debt issues. Our evidence suggests that larger loans (relative to borrower equity) are followed by worse stock performance. We also find that lender protection is negatively related to borrower performance, suggesting the lender is somewhat shielded from the poor performance.

Does a financial system architecture anchored on banks perform better than one centered on markets in fostering technological innovations as engines of growth? In a panel of industrial sectors across a large cross section of countries, I find that while market-based systems have a general positive effect on innovations in all economic sectors, bank-based systems foster more rapid technological progress in more information-intensive industrial sectors, suggesting a heterogeneous impact of financial architecture. Thus, the relative performance of bank-based systems vis-à-vis market-based systems depends on the industrial structure of the economy.

Prior research posits that market imperfections and the lack of institutions that protect investor interests create a divergence between the cost of internal and external funds, thereby constraining firms' ability to fund investment projects through external financing. Financial constraints force firms to manage their cash flows to finance potentially profitable projects. A related stream of research documents that financial constraints due to costly external financing are more pronounced in underdeveloped financial markets. We examine the influence of financial development on the demand for liquidity by focusing on how financial development affects the sensitivity of firms' cash holdings to their cash flows. Using firm-level data for 35 countries covering about 12,782 firms for the years 1994–2002, we find the sensitivity of cash holdings to cash flows decreases with financial development. We also consider additional implications of firms' cash flow sensitivity of cash with respect to firm size and business cycles. Overall, we provide new cross-country evidence of the role of financial development on financial constraints.

We analyze allocations to institutional and retail investors in 441 initial public offerings (IPOs). In addition to the well-known favorable first-day returns, we show that institutions also obtain more allocations in IPOs with better long-term performance. We find that initial institutional flips help predict future returns, suggesting that at least some institutions retain valuable private information about IPO firms. Collectively, these findings illustrate the importance of aftermarket relations between underwriters and investors and that underwriters have discretionary means to compensate IPO investors beyond first-day returns and price stabilization.

We study IPO pricing in Germany to determine whether when-issued trading provides information that is useful for setting IPO offer prices, and whether such trading supplants bookbuilding as a source of information. We find that when-issued trading reveals relevant information for pricing IPOs, and that, once when-issued trading has begun, bookbuilding is not a source of costly information for pricing. But bookbuilding does not appear to be fully supplanted as a source of pricing information. We find evidence consistent with bookbuilding being used to gather information prior to the onset of when-issued trading.

We build a structural two-factor model of default where the stock market index is one of the stochastic factors. We allow the firm to adjust its leverage ratio in response to changes in the business climate for which the past performance of the stock market index acts as a proxy. We assume that the firm's log-leverage ratio follows a mean-reverting process and that the past performance of the stock index negatively affects the firms target leverage ratio. We show that for most credit ratings our model may explain actual yield spreads better than other well-known structural credit risk models. Also, our model shows that the past performance of the stock index returns and the firm's assets beta have a significant impact on credit spreads. Hence, our model can explain why credit spreads may be different within the same credit rating groups and why spreads are lower during economic expansions and higher during recessions.

We study securities market models with fixed costs. We first characterize the absence of arbitrage opportunities and provide fair pricing rules. We then apply these results to extend some popular interest rate and option pricing models that present arbitrage opportunities in the absence of fixed costs. In particular, we prove that the quite striking result obtained by Dybvig, Ingersoll, and Ross (1996), which asserts that under the assumption of absence of arbitrage long zero-coupon rates can never fall, is no longer true in models with fixed costs, even arbitrarily small fixed costs. For instance, models in which the long-term rate follows a diffusion process are arbitrage-free in the presence of fixed costs (including arbitrarily small fixed costs). We also rationalize models with partially absorbing or reflecting barriers on the price processes. We propose a version of the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985) model which, consistent with Longstaff (1992), produces yield curves with realistic humps, but does not assume an absorbing barrier for the short-term rate. This is made possible by the presence of (even arbitrarily small) fixed costs.

This paper measures changes in mutual fund trading costs following two reductions in the tick size of U.S. equity markets: the switch from eighths to sixteenths and the subsequent switch to decimals. We estimate trading costs by comparing a mutual fund's daily returns to the daily returns of a synthetic benchmark portfolio that matches the fund's holdings but has zero trading costs by construction. We find that the average change in trading costs of actively managed funds was positive following both reductions in tick size with a larger and statistically significant increase following decimalization. In contrast, index fund trading costs were unaffected.

This paper investigates whether some individuals are prone to behavioral biases in their 401(k) investments. Using demographic data and allocation information for over 73,000 employees, I examine two allocation biases and a participation bias. The findings suggest that higher salaried employees tend to make significantly better choices. Participants who earn $100, 000 hold 12. 7% less in company stock, are 3% less likely to follow the framing 1/n heuristic, and are 37.7% more likely to participate than those earning $46, 000. Women make better choices in two of the three cases and I find evidence of mental accounting.