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We examine the long-standing question of whether firms derive value from investment bank relationships by studying how the Lehman collapse affected industrial firms that received underwriting, advisory, analyst, and market-making services from Lehman. Equity underwriting clients experienced an abnormal return of around -5%, on average, in the 7 days surrounding Lehman's bankruptcy, amounting to $23 billion in aggregate risk-adjusted losses. Losses were especially severe for companies that had stronger and broader security underwriting relationships with Lehman or were smaller, younger, and more financially constrained. Other client groups were not adversely affected.

We study the effect of financial relationships on firms' investment decisions and access to external finance. In the early twentieth century, securities underwriters commonly held directorships with American corporations. Section 10 of the Clayton Antitrust Act prohibited bankers from serving on the boards of railroads for which they underwrote securities. We find that following the implementation of Section 10, railroads with strong preexisting relationships with underwriters saw declines in their investment rates, valuations, and leverage, and increases in their costs of external funds. Reassuringly, we do not observe similar effects among industrials and utilities, which were not subject to Section 10. Our results are consistent with underwriters on corporate boards acting as delegated monitors, and highlight the potential for regulations intended to address conflicts of interest to disrupt valuable information flows.

This paper examines whether there are efficiencies that benefit issuers and underwriters when a financial intermediary concurrently lends to an issuer while also underwriting its public securities offering. We find issuers, particularly noninvestment-grade issuers for whom informational economies of scope are likely to be large, benefit through lower underwriter fees and discounted loan yield spreads. Underwriters, both commercial banks as well as investment banks, engage in concurrent lending and provide price discounts, albeit in different ways. We find concurrent lending helps underwriters build relationships, increasing the probability of receiving current and future business.

This paper investigates the effects of pre-IPO banking relationships on a firm's IPO. Using a new and unique data set, which compares the firm's pre-IPO banking relationships to the underwriters managing the firm's new issue, I test whether banking relationships established before the firm's IPO ameliorate asymmetric information problems behind high IPO underpricing. The results show that firms with a pre-IPO banking relationship with a prospective underwriter face about 17% lower underpricing than firms without such banking relationships. These results are robust to controlling for the firm's endogenous selection of the pre-IPO banking institution.

This paper challenges the suggestion in prior research on rating systems, and categories more generally, that such systems help facilitate exchange by providing information and distinguishing between different products, proposing that in some instances they create ambiguity instead. I hypothesize that ambiguity in a rating organization's classification system increases with the number of conflict-of-interest relationships it has with producers of the products it rates. Using the rating systems of over 100 U.S. brokerage firms between 1995 and 2000 as a setting, I find that as levels of underwriting increase, so too does the ambiguity of the brokerage firm's rating system. The result is a market for classification based on choices of the market intermediaries rather than the attributes of rated objects themselves.

This article examines the impact of ownership structure on the relation between firm performance and chief executive officer (CEO) turnover in the U.S. property—liability insurance industry. Theoretical implications of stock versus mutual ownership structures on the performance—turnover relation are ambiguous. Our empirical results indicate that CEO turnover is less responsive to firm underwriting performance in mutual insurers compared to stock insurers. In fact, we find that while CEO turnover for stock firms is negatively related to prior performance, no such relationship is found for mutual insurers. These results hold while controlling for board structure and other relevant factors.

This paper examines the effect of commercial bank entry on underwriting spreads for IPOs, SEOs, and debt issues using a long time series that spans 30 years, from 1975 to 2004. We find that, on average, commercial banks charge lower spreads of approximately 72 basis points for IPOs, 43 basis points for SEOs, and 14 basis points for debt over the entire sample period. The economic impact of commercial banks on lowering underwriting spreads is most significant when commercial banks were allowed to enter via Section 20 subsidiaries but persists beyond. Commercial bank entry into underwriting appears to have a procompetitive effect that lasts many years after their initial entry.

Informational scope economies provide a cost advantage to universal banks offering \"one-stop shopping\" for lending and underwriting that enables them to \"lock in\" their clients' subsequent business. This market power reduces universal banks' incentive, relative to that of specialized investment banks, to apply costly underwriting efforts; consequently, universal banks are less successful in selling their clients' securities. Our results suggest that an integrated financial services market is less innovative than one with specialized intermediaries. Our analysis also identifies economy, intermediary, and firm characteristics that motivate either the integration or segmentation of bank lending and underwriting.

We provide evidence that commercial banks extend their reputation in underwriting syndicated loans and private placements (private debt) to their bond-underwriting activities. In the absence of bond market reputation, private-debt-market reputation enables commercial banks to win underwriting mandates from their loan clients. Furthermore, it allows them to credibly commit to investors against opportunistically using lending information and thereby deliver superior certification benefits in the form of higher issue prices relative to investment-bank underwriters. This pricing benefit is not offset by higher underwriting fees and thus results in lower total issuance costs for borrowers.

This research investigates the strategic behavior of private crop insurance firms reinsured by the USDA through the Standard Reinsurance Agreement. This arrangement allows the private firm to strategically allocate individual policies into different risk-sharing arrangements. Thus, firm earnings are conditioned upon accurately forecasting policy loss experience. Our analysis begins with models investigating the characteristics explaining the placement of policies into the assigned risk fund. Then a simulation model of the SRA is used to compare the post-SRA returns of actual firm allocations to two alternative allocation strategies based on a aggregate models and a policy-level econometric forecasting model.