ESSAYS IN EMPIRICAL CORPORATE FINANCE

Abstract

My dissertation consists of two chapters exploring several aspects of empirical corporate finance with a special focus on founder CEOs and family firms. Chapter 1 focuses on the impact of founder CEO leadership on firm value in publicly listed U.S. firms. Previous research on how founder CEOs affect firm value shows mixed results. Using a natural experiment whereby I measure the impact of the sudden deaths of CEOs during the period 1964–2018, I document that stock prices increase by 1.56% upon founder CEOs’ deaths and decrease by 2.89% upon professional CEOs’ deaths. Next, I develop a novel measure of managerial private benefits and discuss several new insights. First, I document that the positive stock price reactions to the sudden deaths of founder CEOs are mainly driven by the fact that founder CEOs extract two times greater private benefits relative to professional CEOs. Second, segregating private benefits into two parts – nepotism and non-nepotism – I find that investors react to both types of private benefits. Third, investor reactions are more pronounced for tunneling-related disclosed private benefits than for investment-related non-disclosed private benefits. Fourth, investors reactions are more pronounced for private benefits related to underinvestment than for private benefits related to overinvestment. Overall, my paper highlights the impact of CEO leadership styles on shareholder wealth. Chapter 2 examines significant family ownership in publicly listed U.S. firms. Instead of holding a diversified portfolio, family owners, such as the Waltons of Walmart, hold large fractions of their wealth in a single stock. To explain this decision, we build a unique model of ambiguity aversion wherein the family’s information advantage in their firm allows them to more accurately estimate value-at-risk in tail events relative to the diversified portfolio. Using an index of macroeconomic uncertainty, we find a strong, negative relation between the uncertainty beta and both family ownership and involvement. Also consistent with our predictions, we document that families with high absolute wealth or risk aversion are unlikely to exit the firm. Our analysis provides an explanation for a family owner’s decision to hold a concentrated stake in a single firm in countries with well-developed financial markets and legal regimes.