Do Peer Firms Affect Corporate Financial Policy?

We show that peer firms play an important role in determining corporate capital structures and financial policies. In large part, firms' financing decisions are responses to the financing decisions and, to a lesser extent, the characteristics of peer firms. These peer effects are more important for capital structure determination than most previously identified determinants. Furthermore, smaller, less successful firms are highly sensitive to their larger, more successful peers, but not vice versa. We also quantify the externalities generated by peer effects, which can amplify the impact of changes in exogenous determinants on leverage by over 70%.     

Catastrophic Risk and Credit Markets

We provide a model of the effects of catastrophic risk on real estate financing and prices and demonstrate that insurance market imperfections can restrict the supply of credit for catastrophe-susceptible properties. Using unique micro-level data, we find that earthquake risk decreased commercial real estate bank loan provision by 22% in California properties in the 1990s, with more severe effects in African–American neighborhoods. We show that the 1994 Northridge earthquake had only a short-term disruptive effect. Our basic findings are confirmed for hurricane risk, and our model and empirical work have implications for terrorism and political perils.     

Implied Equity Duration: A Measure of Pandemic Shutdown Risk

Implied equity duration was originally developed to analyze the sensitivity of equity prices to discount rate changes. We demonstrate that implied equity duration is also useful for analyzing the sensitivity of equity prices to pandemic shutdowns. Pandemic shutdowns primarily impact short‐term cash flows, thus they have a greater impact on low‐duration equities. We show that implied equity duration has a strong positive relation to U.S. equity returns and analyst forecast revisions during the onset of the 2020 COVID‐19 shutdown. Our analysis also demonstrates that the underperformance of “value” stocks during this period is a rational response to their lower durations.     

巅峰激情&璀璨岁月

富有朝气，让人振奋，充满激情，时尚而不失稳重，并将古典的浪漫元素和新的时尚欲望结合，是2003MARKFAIRWHALE高级休闲男装商务系列的设计要点。我把这次发布定名为“颠峰激情”，是把我所欣赏的活跃在世界艺术殿堂颠峰的名流们，以及他们创造的独特经典文化的魅力表达出来。     

Unions and Discriminatory Hiring: Evidence from New Zealand

This study examines the effects of unions on employer compliance with antidiscrimination legislation in New Zealand, using a sample of 227 employers. The results do indicate that unions do reduce discriminatory practices. More specifically, higher levels of unionization do increase the level of employer compliance. However, other union characteristics, such as union size and strike propensity, appeared to have no influence on employer practice.     

Investor Protection and Corporate Governance: Evidence from Worldwide CEO Turnover

Recent research asserts that an essential feature of good corporate governance is strong investor protection, where investor protection is defined as the extent of the laws that protect investors' rights and the strength of the legal institutions that facilitate law enforcement. The purpose of this study is to test this assertion by investigating whether these measures of investor protection are associated with an important role of good corporate governance: identifying and terminating poorly performing CEOs. Our tests indicate that strong law enforcement institutions significantly improve the association between CEO turnover and poor performance, whereas extensive investor protection laws do not. In addition, we find that in countries with strong law enforcement, CEO turnover is more likely to be associated with poor stock returns when stock prices are more informative. Finding that strong law enforcement institutions are associated with improved CEO turnover‐performance sensitivity is consistent with good corporate governance requiring law enforcement institutions capable of protecting shareholders' property rights (i.e., protecting shareholders from expropriation by insiders). Finding that investor  protection laws are not associated with improved CEO turnover‐performance sensitivity is open to several explanations. For example, investor protection laws may not be as important as strong law enforcement in fostering good governance, the set of laws we examine may not be the set that are most important in promoting good governance, or measurement error in our surrogate for extensive investor protection laws may reduce the power of our test of this variable.