| External financing is an important source of funds for corporations. Firms continuously make issuance decisions on debt and equity. For private firms, one of the most important decisions is whether to go public or not. Once they decide to go public, they need to make decisions on the type and the price of the claims they are going to issue at or around the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Public firms keep facing problems on which type of external financing to use based on their current financial conditions. If a firm decides to issue debt, there are several problems it needs to consider, such as whether to issue secured or unsecured debt, and which assets can be used as collateral for secured debt. At the same time, debt holders also need to consider the redeployability of the collateralized asset, which is among other factors affected by the degree of complementarity the asset has with the other assets, as well as by the asset specificity. To understand firms' issuance decisions better, and to study the relationship between firms' assets and debt contract better, this dissertation provides both a theoretical and an empirical analysis of firms' external financial decisions from the following three aspects: the going public decision and the pricing of different types of securities, the financing decision of public firms, and the choice of collateral from a lender's perspective. |
