In the first chapter of this dissertation, I hypothesize that several non-tax-driven benefits of debt induce REITs managers to issue debt despite no apparent tax-driven benefit. Several methodologies and tests applied in capital structure literature are introduced to the literature of REITs capital structure. First, I investigate how the market prices leverage in absence of tax-deductibility benefit. Then, I diagnose the relative importance of several non-tax-driven benefits of leverage in deriving the capital structure decisions of REITs. Third, I conduct a thought investment experiment with debt-restricted vs. non-restricted REITs portfolios. I find weak evidence that leverage, by itself, creates value. Nevertheless, I find strong evidence that during financial crisis debt-restricted REITs perform better than non-restricted ones. Also I find evidence that lends support to the pecking order story of leverage. I conclude that REITs managers issue debt mainly to avoid issuing equity and to maximize wealth of existing shareholders. The second chapter addresses corporate diversification discount. I present and test a hypothesis that diversifiers exchange immediate diversification discount with future value gain attributed to unanticipated financial and strategic advantages of diversification. Two implications of this hypothesis are tested in this dissertation. First, the initial diversification discount found in static methodologies should be attenuated in a dynamic analysis. Second, diversifier's value evolution patterns are driven by the materialization of certain financial and strategic efficiencies. The overall results indicate that there is value recovery over time. Diversifiers' performance and value evolution is dynamically linked to synchronous improvements in market power, internal capital market activities, and cost efficiencies. Further, consistent with current evidence in diversification literature, related diversifiers outperform unrelated diversifiers. Moreover, related diversifiers witness faster value recovery relative to unrelated diversifiers.

This paper studies via experimental setting whether diversification discount exists and what factors affect the magnitude of the discount. The results suggest that experience before decision increases the likelihood of exercising the real option of conglomerates. People are also more likely to convert if it is less risky to do so.

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The Financial Services Modernization Act, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), of 1999 has permitted U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) to operate in non-banking activities that are financial in nature. This dissertation addresses the impact of this across-activity diversification within the U.S. financial services industry on the profitability and the risk-adjusted performance of bank holding companies. Using a variety of diversification measures, the study analyzes the relationship between corporate diversification and the financial performance of BHCs pre- and post-GLBA, from 1990 to 2011. The analysis of the profitability-diversification relationship provides evidence that the negative impact of revenue diversification on the profitability of banking firms that exists in the literature is mainly due to measurement and model specification issues. Failure to differentiate between interest-versus-noninterest and banking-versus-nonbanking types of revenue diversification has resulted in using measures of the first type of diversification to study the second, leading to inaccurate results. Moreover, introducing nonlinearity to the relationship between revenue diversification and profitability provides evidence that this relationship is negative only at relatively low levels of diversification but positive if the level of diversification is sufficiently high. Controlling for these measurement and model specification issues results in profitability premium, rather than discount, that is associated with higher levels of revenue diversification. The study also employs an event study methodology to measure how stock markets respond to mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in which BHCs acquire other banking and nonbanking financial targets. The cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) to acquirers and targets show that M&A that are either non-diversifying or diversifying within closely-related credit intermediation activities increase the value of merged firms. The effect of M&As that combine less-related financial activities on firm value is either negative or insignificant. This implies that market participants have better expectations of the future performance of less diversified firms in managing the risk-return trade-off. Comparing the average CARs of the pre- and post-GLBA eras supports this conclusion.