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This dissertation contains three chapters on topics related to corporate finance and banking. The first two chapters explore how fiscal policy and bank branching deregulation can impact firms’ liquidity and credit constraints, while the third chapter looks at the relationships between executive status, compensation, masculinity, and language complexity.In the first chapter, I shed light on the complexity of liquidity injection programs by providing evidence on unintended consequences that arise when governments and central banks do not consider firm heterogeneity. Utilizing hand-collected, firm-level data from the Paycheck Protection Program, I show that government lending effectively reduced closures (the ultimate consequence of a liquidity shortfall), especially when received during the first two weeks of the program. However, I find that there was significant heterogeneity in the effectiveness of funds, resulting from the government’s broad-brush eligibility guidelines and differences in how firms process policy information. The implementation heavily relied on the banking system, which exacerbated the distributional effects by favoring firms with stronger customer capital. Overall, this chapter highlights the importance of the design of liquidity distribution to maximize its benefits.In the second chapter, I quantify the extent to which financial constraints limit the scope of activity of small firms, influence their labor decisions, and impact their ultimate survival. To study this, I first document how markets with bank branching deregulation experienced an increase in branches, driven by the entry of larger out-of-state banks with a decrease in existing branches. Consequently, small businesses were affected disproportionally. In the treated markets, the overall lending to small businesses declined by 5.4% and remained lower for several years. The decline in credit supply led to a decrease in the number of small businesses; however, many firms were able to stay open by decreasing their demand for labor. Specifically, I document decreases in employment, hours worked, and wages in treated markets. Overall, the results demonstrate the critical dependence of small businesses on relationship lending by local banks and show how temporary negative credit supply shocks can have persistent adverse effects on labor.In the third chapter, I use novel measures of CEO and CFO vocal masculinity and language complexity to gain insight into how these individual-level traits influence executive status and compensation both within and across genders. I find that vocal masculinity, within females, positively impacts their likelihood of becoming a CEO while the opposite is true for males. Furthermore, I find heterogeneity in these relationships depending on the gender composition of the board, the gender of the CFO, and the entrenchment level of a firm. When it comes to communication, CEOs speak with greater complexity than CFOs while both female CEOs and CFOs use more complex language and speak longer during earnings calls than their male counterparts. Finally, for both male and female CEOs, compensation is positively related to masculinity, while increased language complexity only matters for females. These results help provide insight into the determinants of CEO status and compensation and may help explain how boards view and reward perceived competency across genders. |
