本文研究了中国上市公司高管追求政治升迁的动机对公司投资行为的影响。研究结果发现，相对于配对公司，在高管获得政治升迁之前企业存在更为严重的过度投资行为，而在其获得政治升迁之后企业的投资不足现象更为严重。此外，非国有企业在高管政治升迁前的过度投资行为比国有企业更严重。我们还发现，与高管无政治升迁的公司相比，高管获得政治升迁公司在升迁之前的过度投资额越高，对公司经营业绩造成的损害程度越高。

：论文利用金融危机提供的自然实验机会，分析了女性董事的风险规避倾向是否影响公司的投资决策。论文通过对2007-2009年A股上市公司的实证分析发现，在金融危机期间，女性董事比率高的公司投资水平下降的更快，而且这种效应主要集中在过度投资的公司中。进一步的研究表明，在金融危机期间，女性董事比率高的公司倾向于通过减少长期借款来规避债务风险。论文的研究结论表明，在面临不确定性的情况下，女性的风险规避意识有利于减少公司的过度投资，降低债务风险，帮助公司规避金融危机所带来的不利影响。本文丰富了我们对公司投资行为的认识，以及女性高管在公司治理中所扮演的角色。

Coordination costs among a firm’s shareholders have an important impact on the market for corporate control. I use two measures, one based on the geographic distance among institutional shareholders and the other based on the correlation in their portfolio allocation decisions, to proxy for coordination costs. I find that target firms with low shareholder coordination costs experience significantly higher abnormal returns around the takeover announcement. In a similar vein, acquirer firms with low shareholder coordination costs are associated with higher acquisition announcement returns. These effects are particularly pronounced after the 1992 proxy reform that relaxes the restrictions on communication and coordination among shareholders. These findings suggest that the ease of coordination among shareholders plays an important role in the market for corporate control by raising the bargaining power of target shareholders and enhancing the monitoring role of both target and acquirer shareholders.

This paper examines the effects of the post-merger integration duration on acquiring firms’ leverage behavior before and after a merger, using a dynamic model in which full merger benefits cannot be consumed at the instant of a merger, but rather after a prespecified post-merger integration period. The model generates new implications related to acquiring firms’ leverage dynamics along with method of payment choice. Specifically, the model indicates that the post-merger integration duration is negatively associated with the market leverage of newly-merged firms at the time of merger completion and during the integration period. Further, acquirer managers are more likely to use equity to finance a merger when the integration duration is likely to be lengthy. Our empirical tests provide evidence consistent with the model implications.

Little is known about the underlying sources of gains from takeovers. Using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I show that one source of gains is increased productivity of capital and labor in target plants. In particular, acquirers significantly reduce investments, wages, and employment in target plants, though output is unchanged relative to comparable plants. Acquirers also aggressively shut down target plants, especially those that are inefficient. Moreover, these changes help explain the merging firms' announcement returns. The total announcement returns to the combined firm are driven by improvements in target firm's productivity, rather than cutbacks in wages and employment. Also, targets with greater post-takeover productivity improvements receive higher offer premiums from acquirers. These results provide some of the first empirical evidence on the direct relation between productivity, labor, and stock returns in the context of takeovers.

困扰资本结构实证研究的一个难点是如何设计一套实证研究方案，排他性地证实或证伪资本结构的某个理论支系。本文通过一套排他性的实证设计，观察四个控制子样本的资本结构调整行为，并推断出哪个理论居于支配性地位。研究结果支持了动态权衡理论，即公司存在目标资本结构，调整成本阻碍了公司趋近其目标资本结构，调整成本越低，公司趋近目标资本结构的行为越明显；中国关于股票回购的限制阻碍了公司的资本结构调整；中国并不存在“股权融资偏好”现象，融资优序理论和“股权融资偏好理论”无法解释中国公司资本结构调整行为。

We provide empirical evidence and a theoretical explanation for the asymmetries of capital growth rate at the firm level and in the aggregate. Capital growth rate at the firm level is positively skewed, while the average capital growth rate across firms, as well as its slope, is negatively skewed. We develop a model of irreversible corporate investment that can reconcile these opposite patterns. The key to our model is that firms do not observe the true state of economy and have to infer it from noisy signals. The time-varying uncertainty in the learning process leads to variations in the option value of waiting, which causes many firms to react to bad signals arriving in good times, and few firms to react to good signals arriving in bad times. As a result, the capital growth rate at the aggregate level exhibits a negative skewness both in levels and in the slope, even though irreversibility causes positive skewness at the individual firm level.

Agency theory posits that debt-like compensation (such as defined-benefit pensions and other deferred compensation) aligns managerial interests more closely with those of debtholders and reduces the agency cost of debt. Consistent with theory, we find that a higher CEO relative leverage, defined as the ratio of the CEO's inside leverage (debt-toequity compensation) to corporate leverage, is associated with lower cost of debt financing and fewer restrictive covenants, for a sample of private loans originated during 2006-2008. These findings persist after accounting for the endogeneity of CEO relative leverage, and are more pronounced for firms with higher default risk. Additional analysis on a sample of new public bond issues also shows a negative relation between CEO relative leverage and bond yield spread. Overall, the evidence supports the notion that debtholders recognize the incentive effects of executive debt-like compensation and adjust the terms of corporate debt contracts accordingly.

This study examines the effect of transaction costs and information asymmetry on firms’ capital-structure decisions in 40 countries. The findings indicate that transaction costs affect both capital-market timing and capital-structure rebalancing. Past market-timing activity has a significantly negative impact on the current debt ratio, and this impact is stronger for firms facing lower transaction costs of external financing, as defined by legal origin, capital-market development, and securities rules in their home countries. Further analysis indicates that firms in countries with lower transaction costs also rebalance their capital structure more quickly after a deviation from the target, but the rebalancing does not eliminate the market timing effect on capital structure completely.

In this paper we show that the volatility of risk is an important factor in explaining capital structure choices of firms. This effect is over and above the traditional determinants of capital structure such as the current level of risk, size, market-to-book ratio, tangibility of assets and profitability. We show that both (1) the fraction of debt in total new external financing raised by the firm, and (2) the long term debt as a fraction of the assets of the firm, are decreasing in the volatility of risk of the firm. Moreover this negative relationship is significantly stronger for firms that do not have a credit rating. These results are consistent with the theoretical reasons that we provide to explain the negative relationship between leverage and volatility of risk.