Three Essays in Financial Economics

Abstract

The first essay studies changes in the interest-rate exposure of corporate bonds. The floating-rate share of corporate bond issuance varies substantially across time. I show that an increase in the floating-rate bond share predicts decreased returns on fixed-rate Treasury debt. I show that the sign of this correlation, and the correlation between the floating rate issuance and the swap spread, imply that variation in floating-rate share can be explained by shocks to issuers’ desire to be exposed to interest rate risk. The second essay develops methods for seasonal adjustment of highly-dimensional data with cross-sectional pooling. We suggest augmenting classical univariate adjustments with a panel data step that uses machine learning to pool information across counties. Applying our method to weekly retail scanner data from 2006-2014 shows that seasonal adjustment is necessary for meaningful demand analysis. The third essay studies how private-equity driven consolidation in health care affects real outcomes. By matching insurance claims data with information on private equity acquisitions of dental clinics, we show that private equity ownership increases both clinic revenue from reimbursements and the volume of procedures clinicians perform, and that these increases overwhelmingly come from the extensive margin. Further, we show heterogeneity in these effects across the types of procedures clinicians perform, with particular effect on X-rays and other diagnostic procedures.