Why Do Firms Become Widely Held? An Analysis of the ynamics of Corporate Ownership

We consider IPO firms from 1970 to 2001 and examine the evolution of their insider ownership over time to understand better why and how U.S. firms that become widely held do so. In our sample, a majority of firms has insider ownership below 20% after ten years. We find that a firm's stock market performance and trading play an extremely important role in its insider ownership dynamics. Firms that experience large decreases in insider ownership and/or become widely held are firms with high valuations, good recent stock market performance, and liquid markets for their stocks. In contrast and surprisingly, variables suggested by agency theory have limited success in explaining the evolution of insider ownership.

How do Acquirers Choose between Mergers and Tender Offers?

Tender offers provide the advantage of substantially faster completion times than mergers. However, a tender offer signals to the target higher demand for its shares and raises its reservation price. In equilibrium, bidders tradeoff speed and cost. Consistent with this theory, we show that deals in more competitive environments and deals with fewer external impediments on execution are more likely to be structured as tender offers. Tender offers also require higher premiums than mergers. Finally, the rivals of the bidding firm realize significantly lower announcement returns and subsequent operating performance in tender offers than in mergers

Geographic Location, Excess Control Rights, and Cash Holdings

We assess the extent to which remotely-located firms are likely to discretionarily accumulate cash rather than distribute it to shareholders. We consider that these firms are less subject to shareholder scrutiny and, thus, will have high agency conflicts as the distance will facilitate the extraction of private benefits. Consistent with our predictions, we find a positive relation between the distance to the main metropolitan area and cash holdings, and this impact is more pronounced when the controlling shareholder has high levels of excess control rights (i.e., separation of cash-flow rights and control rights). Our results hold even after accounting for all control variables, including financial constraints, and suggest that geographic remoteness can be conducive to severe agency problems, particularly when there is a large separation of cash-flow rights and control rights

The impact of firms’ social media initiatives on operational efficiency and innovativeness

Social media have been increasingly adopted for organizational purposes but their operational implications are not well understood. Firms’ social media initiatives might facilitate information flow and knowledge sharing within and across organizations, strengthening firm‐customer interaction, and improving internal and external collaboration. In this research we empirically examine the impact of social media initiatives on firms’ operational efficiency and innovativeness. Taking the resource‐based view of firms’ information capability, we consider firms’ social media initiatives as strategic resources for operational improvement. We posit that firms’ social media initiatives enhance dynamic knowledge‐sharing routines through an information‐rich social network, leading to both operational efficiency and innovativeness. Collecting secondary data in a longitudinal setting from multiple sources, we construct dynamic panel data (DPD) models. Based on system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, we show that firms’ social media initiatives improve operational efficiency and innovativeness. We identify the importance of an information‐rich social network to the creation of knowledge‐based advantage through firms’ social media initiatives, and discuss the theoretical and managerial implications from the perspective of operations management

Local IPOs, local delistings, and the firm location premium

Borrowing a measure from ecology, we introduce a spatial dispersion index to quantify the firm traits related to firm geographic location and investigate firm exposure to local home bias and local investor risk tolerance as determinants of corporate market value. Consistent with the investor preference for local stocks, we find listed firms benefit from a location premium that increases with firm isolation and local investor wealth. IPOs and delistings are found to affect the market value of neighboring listed firms: isolated firms decrease in value when they cluster due to local IPOs while clustered firms increase in value as they become more isolated due to local delistings. Local firm clustering and risk tolerance also affect IPO underpricing. Empirical findings depict a framework where IPOs and delistings are locally jointly determined

Initial Public Offerings and the Firm Location

The firm geographic location matters in IPOs because investors have a strong preference for newly issued local stocks and provide abnormal demand in local offerings. Using equity holdings data for more than 53,000 households, we show the probability to participate to the stock market and the proportion of the equity wealth is abnormally increasing with the volume of the IPOs inside the investor region. Upon nearly the universe of the 167,515 going public and private domestic manufacturing firms, we provide consistent evidence that the isolated private firms have higher probability to go public, larger IPO underpricing cross-sectional average and volatility, and less pronounced long-run under-performance. Similar but opposite evidence holds for the local concentration of the investor wealth. These effects are economically relevant and robust to local delistings, IPO market timing, agglomeration economies, firm location endogeneity, self-selection bias, and information asymmetries, among others. Findings suggest IPO waves have a strong geographic component, highlight that underwriters significantly under-estimate the local demand component thus leaving unexpected money on the table, and support state-contingent but constant investor propensity for risk

Attitudes Toward Noncompliance and the Demand for External Financing

We study the link between the individual propensity to violate moral principles and the demand for finance based on two data sets: the World Values Survey and a data set with the legal records of U.S. chief executive officers (CEOs). We find that individuals who are more tolerant of moral principle violations are more likely to borrow. Corporate executives with legal records are also associated with larger mortgages. Reverse causality and attitudes toward risk are unlikely explanations for our findings. We contend that noncompliance relaxes participation constraints in capital markets by lowering the psychological costs of entering and breaking a contract