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Using a large sample of U.S. firms during 1987–2011, we find robust evidence that the issuance of seasoned equity is associated with abnormally high future stock price crash risk. The association between seasoned equity offerings and crash risk is stronger among offerings that involve the sale of secondary shares (existing shares sold by insiders or large blockholders). We also find that recent seasoned equity issuers are far less likely to experience sudden positive price jumps relative to firms that have not recently issued equity. Our findings of elevated crash risk and diminished jump risk, when taken together, are consistent with a heightened propensity for firms to hoard bad news but not good news when issuing equity.

Is credit card lending by credit unions within the United States primarily a service to members or a profit generating product?  This paper examines the impact of credit card lending on the performance of U.S. credit unions from 2000-2017. A panel data approach using fixed effects regression methodology is undertaken to make comparative analyses of credit union performance across several dimensions including the percentage of the firm’s assets in credit card loans and percent of members with a credit card. Credit unions are stratified into deciles by size and significant results are found using this methodology. Controlling for delinquencies and charge-offs among other variables, credit card lending significantly increases ROA for both large and small credit unions, but only after the Financial Crisis of 2008, and the establishment of the CARD Act in 2009. Interestingly, the ROA of small credit unions significantly increases with the percentage of members using the institution’s credit card.  This result suggests that small credit unions would benefit by increasing the penetration of credit cards within their membership base.

The fact that publicly traded companies incur substantial costs when issuing new equity has been extensively documented in the empirical finance literature. In particular, numerous studies show that seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) tend to be priced significantly below prevailing market prices, thereby causing issuers to leave money on the table. Offer price discounting is an indirect flotation cost borne by pre-SEO shareholders that, according to extant theoretical and empirical research, arises due to asymmetric information. A heretofore unrelated literature argues that corporate multinationalism, i.e., establishing operations in one or more foreign countries, exacerbates the asymmetric information problem via greater costs to shareholders of monitoring the activities and performance of foreign subsidiaries. Motivated by these lines of thought, I investigate the relation between SEO discounting and corporate multinationalism. Using a sample of SEOs completed by U.S. firms between 1998 and 2016, I show that offer price discounting is significantly higher in offerings conducted by multinational firms relative to those conducted by purely domestic firms after controlling for known determinants of SEO discounts. This effect is stronger for multinational firms with foreign subsidiaries spread across a greater number of countries and weaker for multinationals that hire a high-reputation underwriter to lead the underwriting syndicate. These findings suggest that asymmetric information costs borne by seasoned equity issuers are increasing in the geographic scope of a firm’s operations, which can be mitigated by certification from a highly reputed lead underwriter.

A nascent literature in finance and accounting on tail risk in individual stock returns concludes that bad news hoarding by corporate managers engenders sudden, extreme crashes in a firm’s stock price when the bad news is eventually made public. This literature finds that firm-specific crash risk is higher among firms with more severe asymmetric information and agency problems. A hitherto disjointed literature spanning the fields of international business, finance, and accounting suggests that geographic dispersion in a firm’s operations, and especially dispersion across different countries, gives rise to organizational complexities and greater costs of monitoring that can exacerbate asymmetric information and agency problems. Motivated by the confluence of arguments and findings from these two strands of literature, this paper examines whether stock price crash risk is higher among multinational firms than domestic firms. Using a large sample of U.S. headquartered firms during 1987-2011, we find robust evidence that multinational firms are significantly more likely to crash than domestic firms. Moreover, we show that the difference in crash risk between multinational and domestic firms is most acute among firms with weaker corporate governance mechanisms, including weaker shareholder rights, less independent boards, and less stable institutional ownership. Our analysis indicates that stronger monitoring from each of these three governance mechanisms significantly attenuates the positive relation between crash risk and multinationality. Our findings are robust to the use of alternative measures of crash risk and to controlling for known determinants of crash risk identified in prior studies. Our study offers new insights that should hold value for scholars and market participants interested in understanding the implications of heighted agency problems that multinational firms are likely to encounter and scholars and market participants interested in developing models that more accurately predict tail risk in the equity returns of individual firms.

This paper examines how uninsured deposits influence credit union funding and whether private excess deposit insurance alters the stability, pricing, and lending capacity of uninsured deposits — deposits that exceed the federal deposit insurance limit. Using U.S. credit union Call Report data from 1995–2022, we exploit variation across institution size, insurance regime, and participation in optional private excess deposit insurance.  We distinguish between pre-crisis (1995–2007) and post-crisis (2009–2022) periods surrounding the 2008 expansion of federal insurance limits.  We document pronounced heterogeneity across the size distribution.  For small credit unions, uninsured deposits are limited in scale and are associated with lower loan intensity.  In contrast, uninsured deposits play a central funding role for large credit unions, which account for 94% of industry assets and 97% of uninsured deposits. For these institutions, uninsured deposits support lending and command higher funding costs — effects that are significantly moderated by excess deposit insurance, reducing funding costs by approximately 27 basis points during the pre-crisis period.  Following 2008, excess insurance participation declines among large institutions but increases modestly among small firms.  Overall, excess deposit insurance functions as a partial substitute for federal coverage, stabilizing uninsured funding without increasing delinquency rates — evidence against moral hazard.

This paper examines how uninsured deposits influence credit union funding and whether private excess deposit insurance alters the stability, pricing, and lending capacity of uninsured deposits — deposits that exceed the federal deposit insurance limit. Using U.S. credit union Call Report data from 1995–2022, we exploit variation across institution size, insurance regime, and participation in optional private excess deposit insurance.  We distinguish between pre-crisis (1995–2007) and post-crisis (2009–2022) periods surrounding the 2008 expansion of federal insurance limits.  We document pronounced heterogeneity across the size distribution.  For small credit unions, uninsured deposits are limited in scale and are associated with lower loan intensity.  In contrast, uninsured deposits play a central funding role for large credit unions, which account for 94% of industry assets and 97% of uninsured deposits. For these institutions, uninsured deposits support lending and command higher funding costs — effects that are significantly moderated by excess deposit insurance, reducing funding costs by approximately 27 basis points during the pre-crisis period.  Following 2008, excess insurance participation declines among large institutions but increases modestly among small firms.  Overall, excess deposit insurance functions as a partial substitute for federal coverage, stabilizing uninsured funding without increasing delinquency rates — evidence against moral hazard.

Using a large sample of bond rating downgrades of US firms announced by the three largest rating agencies during 1997-2023, I find that cumulative abnormal stock returns (CAR) spanning the day of and day following downgrade announcements are significantly and negatively related to annual report readability, indicating that downgrades are more informative among firms with more readable annual reports. My baseline regression results indicate that a one standard deviation improvement in annual report readability corresponds to a reduction in the announcement CAR of approximately forty-three basis points, which is economically meaningful given that it constitutes roughly 27% of the sample average announcement CAR of -1.62%. Furthermore, additional analysis reveals that the informativeness enhancing effect that better annual report readability has on rating downgrades is stronger among firms that should be more difficult to monitor and evaluate, including lower rated firms, firms with high stock return volatility, and younger firms. Overall, the results strongly support the hypothesis that well-written annual reports facilitate more timely and informative bond rating downgrades, especially among more informationally problematic firms.

Is credit card lending by credit unions within the United States primarily a service to members or a profit generating product?  This paper examines the impact of credit card lending on the performance of U.S. credit unions from 2000-2017. A panel data approach using fixed effects regression methodology is undertaken to make comparative analyses of credit union performance across several dimensions including the percentage of the firm’s assets in credit card loans and percent of members with a credit card. Credit unions are stratified into deciles by size and significant results are found using this methodology. Controlling for delinquencies and charge-offs among other variables, credit card lending significantly increases ROA for both large and small credit unions, but only after the Financial Crisis of 2008, and the establishment of the CARD Act in 2009. Interestingly, the ROA of small credit unions significantly increases with the percentage of members using the institution’s credit card.  This result suggests that small credit unions would benefit by increasing the penetration of credit cards within their membership base.

The fact that publicly traded companies incur substantial costs when issuing new equity has been extensively documented in the empirical finance literature. In particular, numerous studies show that seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) tend to be priced significantly below prevailing market prices, thereby causing issuers to leave money on the table. Offer price discounting is an indirect flotation cost borne by pre-SEO shareholders that, according to extant theoretical and empirical research, arises due to asymmetric information. A heretofore unrelated literature argues that corporate multinationalism, i.e., establishing operations in one or more foreign countries, exacerbates the asymmetric information problem via greater costs to shareholders of monitoring the activities and performance of foreign subsidiaries. Motivated by these lines of thought, I investigate the relation between SEO discounting and corporate multinationalism. Using a sample of SEOs completed by U.S. firms between 1998 and 2016, I show that offer price discounting is significantly higher in offerings conducted by multinational firms relative to those conducted by purely domestic firms after controlling for known determinants of SEO discounts. This effect is stronger for multinational firms with foreign subsidiaries spread across a greater number of countries and weaker for multinationals that hire a high-reputation underwriter to lead the underwriting syndicate. These findings suggest that asymmetric information costs borne by seasoned equity issuers are increasing in the geographic scope of a firm’s operations, which can be mitigated by certification from a highly reputed lead underwriter.

Using a large sample of U.S. firms during 1987–2011, we find robust evidence that the issuance of seasoned equity is associated with abnormally high future stock price crash risk. The association between seasoned equity offerings and crash risk is stronger among offerings that involve the sale of secondary shares (existing shares sold by insiders or large blockholders). We also find that recent seasoned equity issuers are far less likely to experience sudden positive price jumps relative to firms that have not recently issued equity. Our findings of elevated crash risk and diminished jump risk, when taken together, are consistent with a heightened propensity for firms to hoard bad news but not good news when issuing equity.