PhD Thesis Defence, Finance

Congratulations to Dr Victoria Slabik who succesfully defended her thesis on December 5th, 2018.

Topic: Essays in Empirical Corporate Finance

Supervisor: François Derrien, Professor of Finance, HEC Paris

Abstract: The first chapter studies how refinancing risk impacts product market performance. This  paper shows that refinancing risk impacts a firm’s product market performance. I find that firms with a large fraction of short-term debt (i.e., debt maturing within three years) exhibit significantly lower growth in sales and market share. The second chapter asks how horizontal M&As affect peer stock market evaluation. Horizontal M&A announcements induce negative average industry peer  revaluations in a large sample of public and private M&A transactions. The average peers’ revaluation is a strong predictor of future industry returns. The revaluation of peers also depends on the public status of the target (positive when the target is public and negative when the target is private) and varies systematically with proxies for overall market misvaluation. Our findings are consistent with the idea that investors incorporate new information about industry-wide misvaluation into the valuation of non-merging firms. The third chapter studies how labor laws affect payout policy. This paper shows that labor bargaining power affects both capital structure decisions and payout policy. I find that the adoption of the wrongful discharge law leads to an increase in dividends per share, dividend yield, and the dividend payout ratio whereas book leverage decreases.