Executive Equity Risk-Taking Incentives and Firms’ Choice of Debt Structure
Iftekhar Hasan, Walid Saffar, Yangyang Chen, Leon Zolotoy
Journal of Banking and Finance,
December
2021
Abstract
We examine how executive equity risk-taking incentives affect firms’ choice of debt structure. Using a longitudinal sample of U.S. firms, we document that when executive compensation is more sensitive to stock volatility (i.e., has higher vega), firms reduce their reliance on bank debt financing. We utilize the passage of the Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123R option-expensing regulation as an exogenous shock to management option compensation to account for potential endogeneity. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the documented effect of vega is amplified among firms with higher growth opportunities and more opaque financial information; we also find vega's effect is mitigated in firms with limited abilities to tap into public debt market. Supplemental analyses suggest that firms with higher vega face more stringent bank loan covenants. We conclude that, by encouraging risk-taking, higher vega reduces firms’ reliance on bank debt financing in order to avoid more stringent bank monitoring.
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Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts
Elisabeth Kempf, Margarita Tsoutsoura
Journal of Finance,
No. 6,
2021
Abstract
Partisan perception affects the actions of professionals in the financial sector. Linking credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter records, we show that analysts not affiliated with the U.S. president's party downward-adjust corporate credit ratings more frequently. Since we compare analysts with different party affiliations covering the same firm in the same quarter, differences in firm fundamentals cannot explain the results. We also find a sharp divergence in the rating actions of Democratic and Republican analysts around the 2016 presidential election. Our results show that analysts' partisan perception has price effects and may influence firms' investment policies.
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Global Syndicated Lending during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Iftekhar Hasan, Panagiotis Politsidis, Zenu Sharma
Journal of Banking and Finance,
December
2021
Abstract
This paper examines the pricing of global syndicated loans during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that loan spreads rise by over 11 basis points in response to a one standard deviation increase in the lender's exposure to COVID-19 and over 5 basis points for an equivalent increase in the borrower's exposure. This implies excess interestof about USD 5.16 million and USD 2.37 million respectively for a loan of average size and duration. The aggravating effect of the pandemic is exacerbated with the level of government restrictions to tackle the virus's spread, with firms’ financial constraints and reliance on debt financing, whereas it is mitigated for relationship borrowers, borrowers listed in multiple exchanges or headquartered in countries that can attract institutional investors.
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COVID-19 Financial Aid and Productivity: Has Support Been Well Spent?
Carlo Altomonte, Maria Demertzis, Lionel Fontagné, Steffen Müller
Bruegel-Policy Contributions,
No. 21,
2021
Abstract
Most European Union countries have made good progress with vaccinating their populations against COVID-19 and are now seeing a rebound in economic activity. While the scarring effects of the crisis and the long-term implications of the pandemic are only partially understood, the effects of support given to firms can be evaluated in order to help plan the removal of crisis support. An analysis of France, Germany and Italy shows the potential for ‘cleansing effects’ in that it was the least-productive firms that have been affected most by the crisis. While support was generally not targeted at protecting good firms only, financial support went by and large to those with the capacity to survive and succeed. Labour schemes have been effective in protecting employment.
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Does Gender Affect Innovation? Evidence from Female Chief Technology Officers
Wassim Dbouk, Iftekhar Hasan, Nada Kobeissi, Qiang Wu, Li Zheng
Research Policy,
No. 9,
2021
Abstract
In this paper, we examine the impact of female Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) on corporate innovation. We find that firms with female CTOs are more innovative (as captured by both patent counts and patent citations) than firms with male CTOs. This effect is more pronounced for firms with a stronger innovation-supportive culture, firms with female CEOs, and when female CTOs are more powerful. Using mediation analyses, we further validate that female CTOs’ transformational leadership style is a plausible mechanism through which they affect innovation positively.
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Explaining Wage Losses After Job Displacement: Employer Size and Lost Firm Wage Premiums
Daniel Fackler, Steffen Müller, Jens Stegmaier
Journal of the European Economic Association,
No. 5,
2021
Abstract
This paper investigates whether wage losses after job displacement are driven by lost firm wage premiums or worker productivity depreciations. We estimate losses in wages and firm wage premiums, the latter being measured as firm effects from a two-way fixed-effects wage decomposition. Using new German administrative data on displacements from small and large employers, we find that wage losses are to a large extent explained by losses in firm wage premiums and that premium losses are largely permanent. We show that losses strongly increase with pre-displacement employer size. This provides an explanation for large and persistent wage losses reported in previous displacement studies typically focusing on large employers, only.
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Worker Participation in Decision-making, Worker Sorting, and Firm Performance
Steffen Müller, Georg Neuschäffer
Industrial Relations,
No. 4,
2021
Abstract
Worker participation in decision-making is often associated with high-wage and high-productivity firm strategies. Using linked employer–employee data for Germany and worker fixed effects from a two-way fixed-effects model of wages capturing observed and unobserved worker quality, we find that plants with formal worker participation via works councils indeed employ higher quality workers. We show that worker quality is already higher in plants before council introduction and further increases after the introduction. Importantly, we corroborate previous studies by showing positive productivity and profitability effects even after taking into account worker sorting.
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Bank Concentration and Product Market Competition
Farzad Saidi, Daniel Streitz
Review of Financial Studies,
No. 10,
2021
Abstract
This paper documents a link between bank concentration and markups in nonfinancial sectors. We exploit concentration-increasing bank mergers and variation in banks’ market shares across industries and show that higher credit concentration is associated with higher markups and that high-market-share lenders charge lower loan rates. We argue that this is due to the greater incidence of competing firms sharing common lenders that induce less aggressive product market behavior among their borrowers, thereby internalizing potential adverse effects of higher rates. Consistent with our conjecture, the effect is stronger in industries with competition in strategic substitutes where negative product market externalities are greatest.
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Stock Liquidity, Empire Building, and Valuation
Sris Chatterjee, Iftekhar Hasan, Kose John, An Yan
Journal of Corporate Finance,
2021
Abstract
We conjecture that high stock liquidity negatively affects firm valuation by inducing inefficient investment. Using takeovers of public targets to study the empire-building motive, we find that a liquid firm is more likely than an illiquid firm to acquire a public firm. Such a takeover by a bidder with higher stock liquidity destroys bidder value to a larger degree. These patterns occur in both stock and cash acquisitions and hold after we use decimalization of tick size as a quasi-exogenous shock to stock liquidity. Finally, we show that financial constraints and corporate governance play important roles in the effects of stock liquidity on empire building in mergers and acquisitions.
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The Impact of Delay: Evidence from Formal Out-of-Court Restructuring
Randall K. Filer, Dejan Kovač, Jacob N. Shapiro, Stjepan Srhoj
Abstract
Bankruptcy restructuring procedures are used in most legal systems to decide the fate of businesses facing financial hardship. We study how bargaining failures in such procedures impact the economic performance of participating firms in the context of Croatia, which introduced a „pre-bankruptcy settlement“ (PBS) process in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007 - 2009. Local institutions left over from the communist era provide annual financial statements for both sides of more than 180,000 debtor-creditor pairs, enabling us to address selection into failed negotiations by matching a rich set of creditor and debtor characteristics. Failures to settle at the PBS stage due to idiosyncratic bargaining problems, which effectively delays entry into the standard bankruptcy procedure, leads to a lower rate of survival among debtors as well as reduced employment, revenue, and profits. We also track how bargaining failures diffuse through the network of creditors, finding a significant negative effect on small creditors, but not others. Our results highlight the impact of delay and the importance of structuring bankruptcy procedures to rapidly resolve uncertainty about firms‘ future prospects.
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