How households shift spending across firms in response to income fluctuations is an important source of firm risk. Using transaction-level data, we study how households interact with the universe of retailers following income changes. We find that income increases within and across households result in substitution toward retailers in a category that are higher quality; smaller; more profitable; and have higher labor intensity, research and development (R&D) intensity, and equity betas. Although not all shifts are economically large, they do not average out across retailers. Thus, retailer choice has implications for key financial and macroeconomic outcomes, such as aggregate profitability and labor demand.

Many academic studies use fixed preannouncement event days (e.g., -20,-42, or -63) to measure takeover premiums. In this paper, we show that the use of traditional fixed windows generates premiums that are underestimated by as much as 8 percentage points. This downward bias is especially severe for transactions with long processes (e.g., target-initiated deals). We take account of this bias by hand collecting deal initiation dates and show that using these dates results in measured premiums that give contradictory conclusions to those found in existing literature. We also offer guidance for measuring premiums if hand collecting data is impractical.

Researchers disagree about the impact of board independence on firm value. The disagreement generally stems from the endogenous nature of board appointments. I add new evidence to this discussion by using a sample of closed-end funds to document the value-enhancing effects of independent boards. Using cross-sectional, difference-in-differences, and instrumental variables techniques, I address these endogeneity concerns and find consistent evidence that board independence is associated with higher firm value.

We hypothesize that greater economic policy uncertainty (EPU) leads to increases in unhealthy behaviors by lowering individuals’ impulse control. Based on 6.1 million interviews over 22 years, our analysis reveals a positive relation between EPU and the propensity to make poor lifestyle choices, including higher rates of alcohol consumption, a larger number of drinks consumed, and greater binge drinking. EPU has long-lasting effects on drinking behavior, consistent with habit formation. Moreover, the relation is stronger for younger individuals whose habits are more malleable. We find similar results when using smoking rates to measure unhealthy choices.

We test whether lenders’ screening incentives weaken when faced with the possibility of loan sales. We adopt a new measure of lending standards, the processing time for mortgage applications at the loan level, and use the collapse of the nonagency mortgage-backed securities issuance market as a natural experiment. Secondary market liquidity for nonconforming loans decreased significantly at the end of 2007, but the market for securitizing conforming loans did not experience the same breakdown. Following this event, lenders spent significantly more time screening applications for loans larger than the conforming loan limits than for those below the limits. The processing-time gap widened more for banks with lower capital, greater involvement in the originate-to-distribute model, and larger assets.

We examine liquidity-related characteristics of U.S. firms with cross-listed shares in 20 foreign markets in the 1950–2013 period. We find that firms after foreign-market listing exhibit lower liquidity sensitivity and lower liquidity beta and suffer less from transitory price shocks. These results are stronger when firms are listed on multiple exchanges and in larger and more liquid markets. The liquidity enhancement is associated with firms’ increased foreign ownership postlisting and is effective for firms with high levels of volatility, foreign income, and foreign trading and a high probability of informed trading. Our findings provide support for global markets providing liquidity and reducing liquidity risk to U.S. firms.

We find that contrary to popular belief, CEOs with long compensation duration do not make better long-term investment decisions. Using a comprehensive pay duration measure, we find that acquisitions conducted by CEOs with long compensation duration receive more negative announcement returns, and experience significantly worse post-acquisition abnormal operating and stock performance, compared with deals conducted by CEOs with short compensation duration. The negative correlation between compensation duration and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) performance is driven by long-term time-vesting plans, not by performance-vesting plans. The results suggest that extending CEO pay horizons without implementing performance requirements is insufficient to improve managerial long-term investment decisions.

By employing a novel, hand-collected sample of withdrawn and completed share issue privatizations, we show that both groups undergo comparable restructuring processes over the 3 years preceding the event. We employ matching procedures to explicitly control for the restructuring effect, isolating the effect of the ownership transfer from state to private investors on corporate policies and performance. We document that, absent the ownership transfer, most of the gains realized during the restructuring process are reabsorbed over the posttreatment period. The transition from state to private ownership thus represents a necessary condition for the long-term success of privatization programs.

We document the central role of collateral in the pricing of tri-party repos. Markets are competitive for repos with safe collateral but are severely segmented for repos with risky collateral, such as equities and low-grade corporate bonds. Fund families are the sole contributors to the segmentation, and collateral concentration is the main determinant in the substantial variation in repo pricing, both across and within segments. The segmented structure points to Fidelity as a systemically important player and the markets potential fragility. Facing market segmentation, dealers optimize financing costs by allocating their collateral across fund families.

The liquidity-coverage ratio (LCR) requires banks to hold enough liquidity to withstand a 30-day run. We study the effects of the LCR on broker-dealers, the financial intermediaries at the epicenter of the 2007–2009 crisis. The LCR brings some financial-stability benefits, including a significant maturity extension of triparty repos backed by lower-quality collateral, as well as the accumulation of larger liquidity pools. However, it also leads to less liquidity transformation by broker-dealers. We also discuss the liquidity risks not addressed by the LCR. Finally, we show that a major source of fire-sale risk was self-corrected before the introduction of postcrisis regulations.