Three Essays on the Strategic Effects of Debt on Firms' R&D Decisions PDF Download

Author: Sungcheon Kang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Author: Matteo P. Arena
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporate debt
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation examines the determinants of the corporate debt choice between different forms of debt financing and different countries. By examining the most extensive sample of U.S. debt issues to date, Essay 1 shows that firms that issue 144A debt are significantly different from firms that privately place non-bank debt without using the 144A rule. I also find that traditional private placements rather than bank loans are the favorite debt source for firms with good credit quality that cannot access the public market because of flotation costs and information asymmetry. Essay 2 examines how governance provisions that affect the cost of debt are related to the corporate debt choice. I find that firms with fewer takeover defenses and larger blockholder ownership are more likely to issue private debt. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that private debt claimants can reduce the expected negative impact of takeovers on debtholder value by enforcing stricter covenants or by renegotiating debt in case of takeover. Essay 3 examines the external debt financing choices of multinational firms by using a unique international dataset of firm-level debt offerings. I show that tax-based incentives, country-specific investor preferences, and difference in legal regimes across countries influence multinational firms in their debt location choice.

Author: Lijun Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation contains three essays on debts of different forms that make contributions to the areas of international macroeconomics and spatial economics. In particular, the first two essays study sovereign debts. They examine sovereign default behaviors together with interactions between sovereign defaults and countries' costs of borrowing. The third essay looks at bank loans. It explores the possibility of understanding economic agglomeration through distance-related financial frictions firms face when borrowing from banks.

Author: Chady Emile Gemayel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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In the first chapter of this dissertation, I show that firms strategically liquidate their growth options and reputational capital after loan covenant violations. Loan covenant violations increase creditors' relative bargaining power, shifting control rights towards debt holders. I use Amazon product metadata and product reviews in an event study framework to identify changes firms make to their product strategies after these violations. In the two quarters after new loan covenant violations, firms decrease both their product portfolio size and their product quality. I use product review text to show that firms actively reduce product quality by increasing the rate of product failure. These changes increase short-term cashflows, consistent with firms' decisions aligning with creditors' incentives. Violating firms apply these changes strategically within their product portfolios. After covenant violations, firms cull the set of products sold in product markets with more competitors and lower the quality of their less popular products. These strategic decisions reduce the long-term costs of changing product quality and product portfolio size. In the second chapter of this dissertation (with Nimesh Patel), we find that domestic firms invest in their reputational capital in response to increases in international competition. Specifically, American firms increase the quality of their products after positive Chinese import competition shocks. We determine that this is an active decision by identifying product level changes, finding significant reductions in the rate of product failures for domestic firms. Firms build reputational capital by increasing product quality, allowing them to differentiate their products from those of their competitors. We find that product portfolio size attenuates our results, consistent with less diversified firms having greater incentive to differentiate their products. In the third chapter of this dissertation, I study the effects of initial public offerings on product quality. Public firms, unlike private firms, are required to regularly disclose financial and business information. The relative lack of information on private firms that results from this regulatory difference makes quantifying how firms change as a result of going public difficult. I use Amazon product data spanning both private and public firms in an event study framework to identify a decrease in product quality after firms complete their initial public offerings. I find that the decrease in product quality after firms go public is driven by an increase in both the rate of negative brand recognition and the rate of negative customer service experiences.

Author: David Russell Hansen
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.

Author: Yuan Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The study consists of three research topics about corporate ownership and financial issues. Existing literature focuses on overall corporate ownership structure. This study extends the existing literature by studying the impacts of different ownership types. Different types of shareholders are different in several key aspects such as investment policies, targets, and risk preference, all of which influence how they execute their screening role over the companies, and are important determinants of firms' decisions. To the extant literature, scholars have employed various perspectives to examine corporate ownership. In this study, I will be focusing on the behavior agency theory, agency theory, and socioemotional wealth theory, in the hope of bringing a more nuanced insight of the impacts of different corporate ownership on financial issues, such as, cost of bank loan, the formation of international joint venture, and CEO turnover. In the first essay, I employ a sample of U.S. public companies between 2007 and 2016 to explore the joint effects of executive inside debt (EID) and family involvement on the cost of bank loans. The empirical results indicate that the mitigating effect of EID on the cost of bank loans is attenuated for family firms. In addition, I provide evidence for the following: 1) the mitigating effect of EID on cost of debt is strengthened when a firm's performance is lower than its aspiration level and 2) the moderating effect of family involvement is significant when firm performance is above its aspiration level. Collectively, our findings support the behavioral agency prediction that family involvement shapes firms' risk-taking preference, which acts as a substitute for EID in decreasing the cost of debt. In the second essay, I examine whether family involvement in business affects firms' engagement in international joint ventures (IJVs). Building on the narrow framing perspective, I argue that family businesses are more prone to utilize risk diversifying strategies over multiple IJV choices than non-family firms, because the family firms' decisions tend to be broadly-framed. Examining the interaction between three IJV decisions (type of IJV, choice of host country, and number of partners) in a sample of 1,439 IJVs formed by publicly traded companies in the US, we found support for our predictions. In the third essay, I explore how institutional holding together with other finance factors affect the likelihood of CEO turnover and whether analyst forecast accuracy serves as a mechanism through which institutional holding influences the likelihood of CEO turnover. I find that increased institutional shareholding results in a lower likelihood of CEO turnover directly as well as indirectly (through the mechanism of analyst forecast accuracy). We also investigate the impact of CEO turnover on subsequent firm performance using market-based measures, including firm value and the cost of equity. Moreover, we examine whether different types of CEO turnover would make a difference on firm value and cost of equity. Our results reveal that after CEO turnover-especially when the previous CEO is forced to leave, and the successor is from outside the company-the firm value is higher, and the cost of equity is lower.

Author: Birzhan B. Batkeyev
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Competition
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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This dissertation consists of three topics that fall under the broad banner of applied economics. The first chapter will show that student debt is negatively related to the extent of investment in risky financial assets by households by using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). An exogenous shock to student debt due to the Higher Education Amendments of 1992 negatively impacts portfolio risk-taking for students already in four- year college at the time of this regulation. Households with significant student debt are more likely to fall behind on their student debt payments when they have significant personal financial portfolio risk. The evidence also suggests that student debt reduces the frequency of trades by households. Further, the negative relation between student debt and personal portfolio risk-taking is stronger for more financially constrained households. The results indicate that student debt may reduce investment in risky assets, thus affecting the long- term wealth of individuals, and may also have repercussions for the broader economy. Firms compete with each other in numerous routine ways, but particularly interesting are firms' responses to competitive threats to their critical assets and operations. Firms may mount vigorous defenses or launch offensive strategies - even bordering on predatory - against rivals that initiate hostile acts. The second chapter will take an empirical approach to analyzing such actions, using observed behavior of a single firm to develop basic facts about strategies and responses to competitive threats from rivals in its industry. An intend is to develop an understanding of the types of responses by one firm to another's initiative, and the factors that determine that choice of response in specific circumstances. The third chapter will analyze the association between a change in pricing policy regime on dispersion of prices for homogeneous goods. Specifically, this study looks into the effects of minimum Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) on dispersion of contact lens prices by using the retail-level data for the most popular contact lens brand. This paper shows the empirical importance of costly consumer search in price dispersion and consistent with predictions from theoretical literature finds a negative relationship between consumer search and price dispersion.

Author: Xiaodai Xin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Debts, External
Languages : en
Pages :

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Abstract: Both economic growth and stabilization require a well-functioning financial system, which includes the central bank and private financial institutions. This dissertation is comprised of three essays on monetary policy and financial development which are related to the roles of the central bank and private financial institutions. To better stabilize the economy, a central bank needs to formulate an optimal strategy for monetary policy and pursues an appropriate objective (targeting regime). In a forward-looking New Keynesian model with persistent output and inflation, the first essay (chapter 2) evaluates a broad hybrid targeting regime when the central bank operates under discretionary monetary policy. By employing the numerical analysis and comparing the performance of different targeting regimes, I find that the hybrid targeting regime yields a social loss closest to that under the optimal committed policy, generating a better outcome than other policy regimes. The second essay (chapter 3) provides new micro-level evidence for the positive relationship between financial development and economic growth based on a large sample of cross-country firm-level data. By examining an important micro channel through which financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms, I find that firms that are more externally dependent grow faster in countries with more developed financial systems. The third essay (chapter 4) investigates the impact of external debt on long-term investment and its interaction with domestic financial intermediation in emerging markets. Extending the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model to a small open economy with the role of financial intermediation, I find that the overall effect of a high level of external debt on investment depends heavily on the degree of domestic financial intermediation. Using a large sample of panel data on 76 developing countries over the last three decades, the empirical results indicate that when a country's domestic banking sector develops to a certain degree, the high level of external debt facilitates investment.

Author: Srijana Dhakhwa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Capital movements
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Author: Martin Shubik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262693110
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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This first volume in a three-volume exposition of Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics" explores a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. This is the first volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"--a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of money and financial institutions that reconciles micro- and macroeconomics, using as a prime tool the theory of games in strategic and extensive form. The approach involves a search for minimal financial institutions that appear as a logical, technological, and institutional necessity, as part of the "rules of the game." Money and financial institutions are assumed to be the basic elements of the network that transmits the sociopolitical imperatives to the economy. Volume 1 deals with a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. Volume 2 explores the new economic features that arise when we consider multi-period finite and infinite horizon economies. Volume 3 will consider the specific role of financial institutions and government, and formulate the economic financial control problem linking micro- and macroeconomics.