This thesis investigates the impact of finance on technological innovation. In the first essay we study the causal relation between informativeness of stock prices and innovative efficiency. Using mutual fund flow-driven price pressure as an exogenous shock, we show that impairment of stock price efficiency diminishes innovative efficiency. In the year following the price-pressure shock, patents per R&D dollar drop by 4.7%, while citations are 26.2% lower. Consistent with market feedback, stock mispricing has a greater effect on innovative efficiency when there is less information available from other sources, such as insider information or peers' stock prices. We do not find evidence supporting alternative explanations such as the endogeneity of mutual fund trading, financing effect, managerial incentive, or shareholder short-termism. Overall, our findings show that stock markets improve real efficiency by providing useful market feedback. The second essay examines the implication of intellectual property protection (IP) to equity financing. Firms can protect IP by either keeping their inventions secret or seeking patent protection and disclosing the inventions. We expect the relative protection conferred by the methods to affect the choice between secrecy and patenting. Further, we expect the manner of IP protection to affect the information released by firms and, hence, their stock liquidity and cost of equity capital. For our empirical analysis, we rely on the exogenous passage of state-level statutes that strengthened trade secret protection. We show that stronger trade-secret protection increased opaqueness and reduced stock liquidity. Firms that raised equity capital after the enactment of trade secret statutes experienced more negative stock market reactions. By contrast, the implementation of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), that strengthened patent protection, improved the transparency and stock liquidity of patenting firms. After TRIPS the stock market reaction to equity offering by these firms was also less negative. Our findings suggest that stronger patent protection encourages more information disclosure and reduces financing frictions, while stronger secrecy protection induces opaqueness and makes equity financing more difficult. In the third essay, we show that corporate investment in R&D declines sharply following a financial-covenant violation, wherein creditors can use the threat of accelerating the loan to press for changes in firm policies. The reduction in R&D is more severe in firms with low R&D efficiency i.e., when firm R&D is less productive in terms of ROA and delivers fewer patents and citations. It is striking that, despite decrease in R&D, covenant-violating firms do not suffer a drop in innovative output (patents and citations-to-patents). These results highlight that lenders are judicious in exercising their control rights after covenant violations and suggest that bank financing can be a viable source of financing for innovative firms.

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I examine whether and to what extent tax uncertainty affects a firm's dividend payouts. Based on the argument that tax uncertainty impairs the persistence and predictability of after-tax cash flows, I hypothesize and find that firms with greater tax uncertainty exhibit a lower probability of dividend payouts. The effect of tax uncertainty is stronger in the presence of financial constraints and weaker for firms that distribute dividends to alleviate agency conflicts. Furthermore, I find a negative effect of tax uncertainty on dividend levels, which is moderated by the costs of dividend reductions. These results are economically meaningful as a one standard deviation higher tax uncertainty leads to a 9.9 percentage point lower probability and a $23.6 million reduction in dividend payouts. Taken together, my findings document a real effect of tax avoidance and contribute to the understanding of interactions between uncertain tax avoidance and a firm's financial ecosystem. / Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Series

<p>In the development of turbo machinery components it's desirable to not spend more time than necessary when setting up aero-thermal calculations to investigate uncertainties in the design. This report aims to describe general thoughts used in the development of an ICEM-mesh script and the possible configurations in the script file which enables the user to build mesh-grids with/without clearance gap at the hub and/or shroud for different blade geometries. It also aims to illustrate the performance analysis made on the Vinci LH2 turbine, a next generation upper stage engine to the Ariane 5 rocket, in which the effect of the tip gap size on the efficiency has been studied.</p><p>The calculations made have shown good agreement with experimental data. The efficiency loss due to the mixing of fluid where leakage flow passes the tip gap, which results in growth of a strong vortex, and the fluid passing the blade tip, with almost no work extracted from it, has shown a quite linear efficiency dependence depending on the tip gap size.</p>

In the development of turbo machinery components it's desirable to not spend more time than necessary when setting up aero-thermal calculations to investigate uncertainties in the design. This report aims to describe general thoughts used in the development of an ICEM-mesh script and the possible configurations in the script file which enables the user to build mesh-grids with/without clearance gap at the hub and/or shroud for different blade geometries. It also aims to illustrate the performance analysis made on the Vinci LH2 turbine, a next generation upper stage engine to the Ariane 5 rocket, in which the effect of the tip gap size on the efficiency has been studied. The calculations made have shown good agreement with experimental data. The efficiency loss due to the mixing of fluid where leakage flow passes the tip gap, which results in growth of a strong vortex, and the fluid passing the blade tip, with almost no work extracted from it, has shown a quite linear efficiency dependence depending on the tip gap size.

Cette thèse est articulée en trois chapitres et s’inscrit dans le domaine de la recherche empirique en comptabilité financière. Elle examine les déterminants et les conséquences de la communication des entreprises. Le premier chapitre étudie les effets réels de la communication financière sur les dépenses de publicité des entreprises. Le deuxième chapitre, co-écrit avec Thomas Bourveau et Vedran Capkun, étudie les conséquences réelles de la communication des résultats de recherche médicale sur les marchés financiers et sur la société. Le troisième chapitre, co-écrit avec Vedran Capkun et Yun Lou, analyse l’influence de l’information propriétaire communiquée par des concurrents d’une entreprise sur leurs produits sur la décision de cette entreprise de communication de ses propres informations propriétaires. / This dissertation is composed of three chapters investigating the antecedents and consequences of corporate disclosure in the domain of empirical-archival financial accounting. The first chapter examines the real effects of firm disclosure and its timing on firm advertising investment. The second chapter, joint work with Thomas Bourveau and Vedran Capkun, documents the real consequences of pharmaceutical firms’ clinical trial disclosure in financial markets and on broader society. The third chapter presents a joint project with Vedran Capkun and Yun Lou, exploring intra-industry peer disclosure of proprietary information as antecedents of corporate disclosure decision at product level.

Diese Dissertation untersucht die Auswirkungen von Bankenkrisen auf die Realwirtschaft in drei unabhängigen Kapiteln. Kapitel 1 klassifiziert die geografische Diversifikation einer Großzahl von Banken, anhand deren international syndizierten Kreditportfolios. Ergebnisse zeigen ein höheres Kreditangebot durch diversifizierte Banken während Bankenkrisen die sich in Kreditnehmerländern ereignen. Dieses relativ stabilere Kreditangebot führt zu höherem Investitions- und Beschäftigungswachstum von Unternehmen. Eine weiterführende Unterteilung von Banken anhand derer Nationalität zeigt eine Rangfolge auf: diversifizierte inländische Banken erweisen sich als die stabilste und ausländische Banken mit geringer Diversifikation als die instabilste Finanzierungsquelle. In Kapitel 2 analysiere ich die Rolle der industriellen Spezialisierung von Banken in der Transmission von Finanzierungsshocks. Anhand der Ergebnisse schützen Banken Unternehmen die Teil ihrer spezialisierten Industrien sind vor der Bankenkrise und reduzieren ihre Kreditvergabe hingegen am stärksten an Industrien, in welchen sie weniger spezialisiert sind. Darüber hinaus finde ich Evidenz für Übertragungseffekte durch reduzierte Kreditvergabe auch in Nicht-Krisenländern. Dieser Übertragungseffekt ist jedoch gedämpft für Unternehmen aus spezialisierten Industrien. Kapitel 3 untersucht die Effekte von Bankenrettungen in Europa auf die globalen Kreditströme. Gerettete Banken weisen einen höheren Anstieg des Anteils an inländischen Unternehmen in der Kreditvergabe auf als nicht-gerettete Banken. Das negative Kreditangebot für ausländische Unternehmen führt zu einer Verringerung des Absatz- und Beschäftigungswachstums. Im inländischen Markt hingegen führt die Bankenrettung zu einer Verzerrung der Kreditallokation, hin zu größeren und weniger innovativen Unternehmen. Darüber hinaus dokumentiere ich eine stärkere politische Einflussnahme, da Kontrollrechte im Zuge der Bankenrettung an die Regierung übertragen werden. / This thesis investigates the effect of banking crises on real economic outcomes in three independent chapters. In chapter one, I classify a large sample of banks according to the geographic diversification of their international syndicated loan portfolio. Results show that diversified banks maintain higher loan supply during banking crises in borrower countries. The positive loan supply effects lead to higher investment and employment growth for firms. Further distinguishing banks by nationality reveals a pecking order: diversified domestic banks are the most stable source of funding, while foreign banks with little diversification are the most fickle. In chapter two, I show that banks' industry specialization determines how banks transmit funding shocks during banking crises to borrowers and how they spill over to non-crisis countries. Results show that banks insulate their main industries from the banking crisis while they reduce lending most to their non-main industries. Moreover, I provide evidence on spillover effects, as banks hit by a banking crisis in one borrower country reduce lending to firms in non-crisis countries. However, this contagion effect is significantly weaker for firms in banks' main industries. In chapter three, I examine the effect of government support for European banks, such as recapitalizations on financial integration and firm outcomes. Results show that bailout banks increase their home bias in lending by a quarter more than non-bailout banks. In turn, the negative loan supply effect on discriminated foreign firms translates into lower sales and employment growth. In the home market, government support distorts credit allocation by shifting lending to larger, safer and less innovative firms. Moreover, I document that politicians gain influence over banks by transferring control rights to the government as part of the support scheme.

Ce travail doctoral étudie l’effet « retour » de l’information financière liée aux prix des actions sur les décisions des dirigeants d’entreprise. Plus précisément, j'étudie si et comment les gestionnaires apprennent effectivement les nouvelles informations contenues dans les prix des actions pour guider leurs décisions d'entreprise. Ma thèse de doctorat est composée de trois essais, chacun abordant un aspect différent de ce même sujet. Le premier essai étudie le lien entre l'efficacité informationnelle du marché d'actions et le niveau d’efficacité économique réelle de l'entreprise. Dans le premier essai, je constate que lorsque les prix de l'action agrègent une plus quantité d'informations utile plus grande, les décisions des entreprises prises par les gestionnaires devraient être encore plus optimales efficaces. Le deuxième essai étudie si les gestionnaires cherchent à apprendre les informations utilisées par les vendeurs à découvert. L’étude des prix des actions en présence de vendeurs à découvert est-il utile pour les décisions de l'entreprise ? Dans le deuxième essai, j'ai surmonté les difficultés empiriques en exploitant une caractéristique institutionnelle unique sur le marché des actions de Hong Kong. Je constate que les gestionnaires des entreprises « non-shortable » peuvent tirer profit des informations des vendeurs à découvert sur les conditions économiques sectorielles par l'intermédiaire des prix des actions d'autres entreprises « shortable » dans la même industrie et les utilisent dans leurs décisions d'entreprise. Le troisième essai étudie les effets réels de la négociation d'options à long terme. Dans le troisième essai, je constate que l’introduction d’une catégorie spécifique d'options à long terme stimule la production d'informations privées à long terme et donc entraîne une augmentation de l'informativité des prix sur les fondamentaux à long terme des entreprises. Par conséquent, les dirigeants peuvent extraire davantage d'informations du prix de l’action pour guider leurs décisions d'investissement à long terme. / In my doctoral thesis, I investigate the information feedback from stock prices to managers’ decisions. More specifically, I study whether and how managers learn new information from stock prices to guide their corporate decisions. My doctoral thesis includes three essays focusing on this topic. The first essay studies the relationship between stock market informational efficiency and real economy efficiency at firm-level. In the first essay, I find that when stock prices reflect greater amount of information that managers care about, corporate decisions made by managers become more efficient. The second essay studies whether managers seek to learn short sellers’ information from stock prices and use it in corporate decisions. In the second essay, I overcome the empirical difficulties by exploiting a unique institutional feature in Hong Kong stock market that only stocks included in an official list are allowed for short sales. I find that that non-shortable firms’ managers can learn short sellers’ information on external conditions from shortable peers’ stock prices and use it in their corporate decisions. The third essay studies the real effects of long-term option trading. I find that long-term option trading stimulates the production of long-term information, which managers can use to guide their long-term investment decisions.

This dissertation collects four essays on banks, firms and real effects of bank lending. Owing to the appliance of different econometric methods on several datasets, insights in the behav-ior of and the impacts from financial markets and market participants are generated. In the first chapter, our results uncover a so far undocumented ability of the interbank market to distinguish between banks of different quality in times of aggregate distress. We show empirical evidence that during the 2007 financial crisis the inability of some banks to roll over their interbank debt was not due to a failure of the interbank market per se but rather to bank-specific shocks affecting banks’ capital, liquidity and credit quality as well as revised bank-level risk perceptions. Relationship banking is not capable of containing these frictions, as hard information seems to dominate soft information. In detail, we explore determinants of the formation and resilience of interbank lending relationships by analyzing an extensive da-taset comprising over 1.9 million interbank relationships of more than 3,500 German banks between 2000 and 2012. The second chapter examines the relationship between central bank funding and credit risk-taking. Employing bank-firm-level data from the German credit registry during 2009:Q1-2014:Q4, we find that banks borrowing from the central bank rebalance their portfolios to-wards ex-ante riskier firms. We further establish that this effect is driven by the ECB’s maturi-ty extensions and that the risk-taking sensitivity of banks borrowing from the ECB is inde-pendent of idiosyncratic bank characteristics. Finally, we show that these shifts in bank lend-ing are associated with an increase in firm-level investment and employment, but also with a deterioration of bank balance sheet quality in the following year. Once we analyze the relationship of banks as lenders vis-à-vis banks as borrowers and banks as lenders vis-à-vis non-financial companies as borrowers, we enlarge the understand-ing of non-financial companies not only in terms of being simply borrowers, respectively sub-jects exhibiting of credit risks. Instead, we try to understand the inner working of those com-panies more generally and analyze their quality not only in terms of a bank’s risk assessment but also in terms of the overall market assessment. However, this in turn can generate infor-mation useable to assess the quality of a bank’s credit portfolio in dimensions that so far are not taken into account by the current regulatory framework. Moreover, a better understanding of banks and non-banks beyond the standard lens of the banking and corporate finance litera-ture might promote new scopes for future research connecting those discrete subjects. In this regard, the third chapter analyzes the dependence of price reactions to corporate insider trad-ing on several measures of corporate governance quality. Our results strongly support the view that first, higher corporate governance levels seem to prevent or discourage insiders from engaging in insider trading as means of opportunistic rent extraction. Second, results confirm the notion of buy and sell trades not being just two sides of the same coin. That is, a higher level of corporate governance leads to a better pre-event information environment which results in less positive abnormal returns after insider buy trades as the incremental posi-tive information revealed by the trade is smaller. In contrast, sell trades in firms with better corporate governance are perceived to convey more valuable and most importantly negative information to the capital market so that prices adjust more for companies with better govern-ance schemes. Third, we show that institutional ownership even on an aggregate level is a sufficient measure to proxy a company’s corporate governance level. Hence, as information on companies’ bylaws and on investors’ investment dedication and type for example are scarce, respectively associated with higher costs because one has to gather that information one can refrain from that and instead proxy the governance level with the aggregate measure of institutional ownership. The latter result is important for carrying out future analyses merg-ing and extending the findings of the first two chapters. Last, the fourth chapter abstracts from borrowers as subjects of credit risk, as well, and most importantly extends the analysis of banks, firms and their interactions effecting each other by a macroeconomic perspective of the real effects of bank lending. That is, as capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies’ income and wealth Chapter 4 studies the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. In this regard, real sector firms play a central role in the transmission mechanism we uncover. More specifically, the empirical analysis relies on a new and unique matched data set at the city level and the bank-firm level. To measure bank flow shocks, we show that changes in sovereign spreads of Southern Eu-ropean countries (the so-called PIGS spread) can predict German cross-border bank flows. To achieve identification by geographic variation, in addition to a traditional supply-side varia-ble, we use a novel instrument that exploits a policy assigning refugee immigrants to munici-palities on an exogenous basis. We find that output growth responds more to bank flow shocks in cities that are more exposed to tightness in local real estate markets. We estimate that, during the 2009-2014 period, for every 100-basis point increase in the PIGS spread, the most exposed cities grow 15-2 basis points more than the least exposed ones. Moreover, the differential response of commercial property prices can explain most of this growth differen-tial. When we unpack the transmission mechanism by using matched bank-firm-level data on credit, employment, capital expenditure and TFP, we find that firm real estate collateral as measured by tangible fixed assets plays a critical role. In particular, bank flow shocks in-crease the credit supply to firms and sectors with more real estate collateral. Higher credit supply then leads firms to hire and invest more, without evidence of capital misallocation.