Essays in corporate finance.

Summary The first chapter shows that refinancing risk affects the market performance of a product. I find that firms with a large fraction of short-term debt (i.e., debt maturing within three years) exhibit significantly lower sales and market share growth.The second chapter studies how horizontal mergers and acquisitions affect stock market valuations. Horizontal M&A announcements induce an adverse average industry revaluation in a large sample of public and private M&A deals. Average competitor revaluation is a strong predictor of future industry returns. Competitor revaluation 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 indicators of overall market mispricing. Our findings are consistent with the idea that investors incorporate new information about industry-wide mispricing into the valuation of non-merged firms.The third chapter studies how labor laws affect payment policy. This paper shows that labor's bargaining power affects both capital structure decisions and payments. I find that the passage of the wrongful termination law leads to an increase in dividends per share, dividend yield, and dividend payout ratio, while accounting leverage decreases.