Corporate finance

Corporate finance is the area of finance that deals with the sources of funding, and the capital structure of corporations, the actions that managers take to increase the value of the firm to the shareholders, and the tools and analysis used to allocate financial resources. The primary goal of corporate finance is to maximize or increase shareholder value. Correspondingly, corporate finance comprises two main sub-disciplines. Capital budgeting is concerned with the setting of criteria about which value-adding projects should receive investment funding, and whether to finance that investment with equity or debt capital. Working capital management is the management of the company's monetary funds that deal with the short-term operating balance of current assets and current liabilities; the focus here is on managing cash, inventories, and short-term borrowing and lending (such as the terms on credit extended to customers). The terms corporate finance and corporate financier are also as

Essays in Financial Economics

Kornelia Fabisik

This thesis consists of three parts that study separate subjects in corporate finance and corporate governance. The overarching theme is ownership by CEOs and other insiders. In the first part, which is co-authored work with Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, René M. Stulz, and Jerôme Taillard, we build the largest database of managerial ownership information ever used in the literature. We show that the empirical relation between a firm's Tobin's q and managerial ownership is systematically negative. When we restrict our sample to larger firms as in the prior literature, we confirm earlier findings of an increasing and concave relation between Tobin's q and managerial ownership. We show that cumulative past performance and liquidity can explain these seemingly contradictory results. Better performing firms have more liquid equity, which enables firms and insiders to more easily sell shares after the IPO, and they also have a higher Tobin's q. In the second part, I conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of the pledging phenomenon among U.S. CEOs. Pledging allows the owner of shares to put them up as collateral to a third party in exchange for cash. I show that between 2007 and 2016, 7.6% of publicly listed U.S. firms disclosed that their CEOs had pledged company stock as collateral for a loan. On average, CEOs pledge 38% of their shares. The mean loan value is an economically sizeable $65 million. CEOs use the funds to either double down (6.0%), hedge their ownership (3.5%), or to obtain liquidity while maintaining ownership (90.5%). My event study results reveal that stock market participants view pledging as value-enhancing. Similarly, I find no evidence of its negative shareholder value consequences, except for CEOs who engage in significant pledging. In the third part, I provide the first in-depth analysis of U.S. pledging CEOs who faced margin calls. A margin call occurs whenever the value of collateral backing a loan falls below a certain pre-specified amount. I find that 15% of CEOs with margin loans have at some point faced margin-call-induced selling. The mean (median) drop in CEO ownership following margin-call-induced sales is 31.2% (22.0%). More than 87% of firms do not introduce any type of an anti-pledging policy post margin-call sales by their CEOs which could explain the absence of any major changes in CEO compensation contracts. Corporate policies in firms with CEOs who lost a sizeable ownership stake are not indicative of weakened incentives.

EPFL2020

Essays in Financial Economics

Kevin Marc Rageth

This thesis consists of two chapters that study separate subjects in the area of corporate finance.The first chapter, titled âEconomic Gains in Bank Mergers and Acquisitions â Evidence from Targetsâ, investigates economic gains in bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by focusing on bank targets. Demonstrating efficiency increases resulting from bank M&A has been elusive to the banking literature. Imake use of a novel hand-collected dataset, which allows to observe financial statements for transacted target banks both before and after the deal effective date. Addressing endogeneity concerns by constructing the counterfactual frommergers that fail for reasons exogenous to target performance, I show evidence that acquiring banks create economic value by pursuing M&A deals. Cost reductions and higher post-deal securities productivity constitute bankM&A related value sources. The results are consistent with banks pursuingM&A to realize economies of scale.The second chapter, which is co-authored work with RÃŒdiger Fahlenbrach and RenÃ© Stulz, is titled âHow Valuable Is Financial Flexibility when Revenue Stops? Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisisâ. We use the COVID-19 shock as a laboratory to investigate the value of financial flexibility. Firms with greater financial flexibility should be better able to fund a revenue shortfall resulting from the COVID-19 shock and benefit less from policy responses. We find that firms with high financial flexibility within an industry experience a stock price drop that is 26%, or 9.7 percentage points, lower than those with low financial flexibility. This differential return persists as stock prices rebound. Firms more exposed to the COVID-19 shock benefit more from cash holdings. No evidence suggests that recent payouts worsened the average firmâs drop in stock price. Our results cannot be explained by a leverage effect.

EPFL2022

Essays in Financial Economics

Kornelia Fabisik

EPFL2020

Essays in Financial Economics

Essays in Corporate Finance

Essays in Financial Economics

Essays in Corporate Finance

Essays in Financial Economics

Essays in Financial Economics