The likelihood of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) jumps discontinuously when the stock price equals the most recent equity offer price. Anchoring on the last offer price holds after considering executive turnovers, stock splits, earnings management, or dividend adjustments. Using a fuzzy...

We track the employment history of over 9,000 managers to study the effects of professional experiences on corporate policies. Our identification strategy exploits exogenous CEO turnovers and employment in other firms. Firms run by CEOs who experienced distress have less debt, save more cash,...

Little is known about the price firms pay for stock repurchases. Using a dataset of all U.S. repurchases from 2004 to 2011, we compare the actual average price paid monthly in a repurchase to the average market price for the same stock over various horizons. We find that firms repurchase stock...

This paper examines the impact of financial sponsor competition on corporate buyers. We find that corporate acquirers who purchase targets that financial buyers also bid on outperform corporate acquirers who buy targets bid on by corporate firms only. Deal characteristics, acquirer abilities,...

In 2003, a new law required that 40 percent of Norwegian firms' directors be women ndash; at the time only nine percent of directors were women. We use the pre-quota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the...

We study a sample of diversified firms that alter their organizational structure by divesting a business segment. These firms experience a reduction in the diversification discount after the divestiture. We show that the efficiency of segment investment increases substantially following the...

One influential criticism of the stock market oriented U.S. financial system is that its excessive focus on short term quarterly earnings forces public firms to behave in a myopic manner. We hypothesize that if capital markets pressure listed firms to be myopic in a way that impacts efficiency,...