Three essays in corporate finance

This dissertation consists of three essays in corporate finance. The first essay, co-authored with Thomas Chemmanur, develops a theoretical analysis of the choice of firms between fixed-price offerings and uniform-price auctions for selling shares in IPOs and privatizations. We consider a setting in which a firm goes public by selling a fraction of its equity in an IPO market where insiders have private information about intrinsic firm value. Outsiders can, however, produce information at a cost about the firm before bidding for shares. Firm insiders care about the extent of information production by outsiders, since this information will be reflected in the secondary market price, giving a higher secondary market price for higher intrinsic-value firms. We show that auctions and fixed-price offerings have different properties in terms of inducing information production.; The second essay, co-authored with Yingmei Cheng and Jun Qian, examines the role of financial analysts in helping fund managers make better investment decisions.; The third essay models the incentives of financial analysts to produce firm-specific versus industry-level information. An analyst covering a stock produces information and sells it to an investor. The investor trades and pays a fraction of the profit to the analyst. I show that, for firms in mature industries, the investment value of additional firm-specific information (conditional on the information already reflected in the firm's stock price) is greater than the investment value of additional industry-level information. This gives analysts an incentive to produce more firm-specific information. In contrast, for firms in emerging industries, analysts have an incentive to produce more industry-level than firm-specific information. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...