Essays in Financial Economics

This thesis consists of three chapters that study separate subjects in the area of corporate governance and financial intermediation.

In the first chapter, I study a protectionist anti-takeover law introduced in 2014 in France that covers a subset of all firms in the economy. The law decreased affected firms' likelihood of becoming the target of a merger or acquisition and had a negative impact on shareholder value. There is no evidence that management of those firms subsequently altered firm policies in its interest. Investment, employment, wages, profitability, and capital structure remain unchanged. The share of annual CEO compensation consisting of equity instruments increased by 8.4 percentage points, suggesting that boards reacted to the loss in monitoring by the takeover market by increasing the pay-for-performance sensitivity.

In the second chapter, which is co-authored work with Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, we conduct a detailed analysis of investors in successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). The average ICO has 4,700 contributors. The median participant contributes small amounts and many investors sell their tokens before the underlying product is developed. Large presale investors obtain tokens at a discount and flip part of their allocation shortly after the ICO. ICO contributors lack the protections traditionally afforded to investors in early stage financing. Nevertheless, returns nine months after the ICO are positive on average, driven mostly by an increase in the value of the Ethereum cryptocurrency.

In the third chapter, which is joint work with Christoph Herpfer, we investigate how bankers use information from lending relationships to help borrowers combine resources in strategic alliances. Firms that have borrowed from the same banker or share an indirect connection through a network of bankers are significantly more likely to enter an alliance. Consistent with bankers overcoming informational frictions, their ability to facilitate alliances decreases with network distance, and is stronger for opaque borrowers. Firms connected to more potential partners via banker networks enter more alliances. These alliances are associated with positive announcement returns and brokering banks are more likely to receive future underwriting mandates.