Three Essays on Empirical Corporate Finance

Abstract

This thesis comprises three essays on empirical corporate finance.The first essay provides a new explanation for investment-cash flow sensitivity from the perspective of CEO inside debt holdings. We examine the effect of CEO pensions and deferred compensation (inside debt) on investment-cash flow sensitivity for a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms from 2006 to 2012. We find that the firms with higher relative CEO leverage ratios (CEO’s debt/equity ratio scaled by the firm’s debt/equity ratio) generate higher investment-cash flow sensitivity. Moreover, one standard deviation increase in the logarithm of the relative CEO leverage ratio enlarges investment-cash flow sensitivity by 50%. This positive relationship still holds even after we take endogeneity and financial constraints into account.The second essay explores the net effect of a politically connected board on a firm. Using a quasi-natural experiment in China — a regulatory change to forbid bureaucrats from sitting on the board of public firms — we address the causality by testing the market reaction. Those firms with politically connected directors who are targeted by the regulatory change show a significantly positive abnormal stock return on average. The result is robust for various model settings and for a matched sample using the propensity score methodology. Additionally, the announcement effect when a politically connected director resigns is significantly positive, and significantly higher than the effect when a non-connected director resigns. Overall, our results suggest that the agency cost effect of a politically connected director dominates the value effect.The third essay examines the effect of investor divergence of opinions on the long-run performance of private placements. We propose and construct a direct measure of investor divergence of opinion, based on auction bids data of the private placements in China. We find that firms with higher bids dispersion generate lower long-term stock returns after the issuance of private placements. This effect is economically significant and robust when controlling for market discount and for dispersion in analyst forecasts. Moreover, this negative relation is stronger for stocks with more stringent shortsale constraints. Our findings provide strong evidence in support of the Miller’s (1977) divergence of opinion hypothesis.