Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Moore School of Business

First Advisor

Donghang Zhang

Abstract

The first chapter studies the feedback effects in the loan market. Using the secondary market prices of syndicated loans, I find that information in loan prices has real effects on corporate investment decisions. For public firms, the sensitivity of capital expenditure to their loan price is significant, and this sensitivity is higher when loan prices are more informative. In making M&A decisions, public acquirers are less likely to withdraw a deal when their loan returns are higher. Without access to stock prices, private acquirers change their focus from their public peers’ valuations to their own loan prices as a direct information source. Private acquirers also disclose a potential deal earlier when their loan returns are more positive, and the target firm also has traded loans. Evidence from earnings call transcripts using dictionary-based and large language model (LLM) techniques confirms managerial attention to the secondary loan market. Overall, my findings suggest that an active secondary loan market has important implications for managerial learning and decision-making of firms.

The second chapter examines how retail investors’ opinions about renewable energy and climate change shape investment behavior in energy finance. Using a decade of U.S. county-level survey data, we construct novel firm-level measures that capture retail investors’ energy- and global-warming-related opinions. We find that, following the disclosure of firm-level dirty energy incidents, firms experience a significant decline in retail net demand when their retail investors are supportive of renewable energy, believe in global warming, or are concerned about climate change. This pattern is evident in both marketable retail orders from TAQ and user records from Robinhood Markets. In contrast, we do not find a comparable effect of these opinions for incidents that are risky but unrelated to energy activities. The results are not driven by local demographic characteristics, regulatory stringency, or political leanings. Overall, our findings suggest that energy finance is meaningfully influenced by investor views on energy and climate.

The third chapter examines how SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) sponsors influence deal outcomes. The sponsor of a SPAC plays an important role in setting up the SPAC and in searching for a private target firm in the deSPACing process. A SPAC sponsor works or competes with an established investment bank in bringing a private firm to the public market. Besides being criticized for receiving high returns, whether they have an impact on deal outcomes remains unknown, and their role in transforming the investment banking landscape for IPOs is understudied. This paper fills the gap by uncovering how PE-affiliated sponsors attempt to improve merger outcomes by identifying good-quality private firms via a new listing path, i.e., SPACs. Their performance provides evidence on how rational SPAC deals may benefit both private firms that plan to go public and investors who are interested in investing in private firms.

Rights

© 2026, Siwen Zhang

Download

Share

COinS