The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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Corporate Equity Ownership and the Governance of Product Market Relationships

Published: 05/16/2006   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2006.00871.x

C. EDWARD FEE, CHARLES J. HADLOCK, SHAWN THOMAS

We assemble a sample of over 10,000 customer–supplier relationships and determine whether the customer owns equity in the supplier. We find that factors related to both contractual incompleteness and financial market frictions are important in the decision of a customer firm to take an equity stake in their supplier. Evidence on the variation in the size of observed equity positions suggests that there are limits to the size of optimal ownership stakes in many relationships. Finally, we find that relationships accompanied by equity ownership last significantly longer than other relationships, suggesting that ownership aids in bonding trading parties together.


Do Banks Provide Financial Slack?

Published: 12/17/2002   |   DOI: 10.1111/1540-6261.00464

Charles J. Hadlock, Christopher M. James

We study the decision to choose bank debt rather than public securities in a firm's marginal financing choice. Using a sample of 500 firms over the 1980 to 1993 time period, we find that firms are relatively more likely to choose bank loans when variables that measure asymmetric information problems are elevated. The sensitivity of the likelihood of choosing bank debt to information problems is greater for firms with no public debt outstanding. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that banks help alleviate asymmetric information problems and that firms weigh these information benefits against a wide range of contracting costs when choosing bank financing.