In 2005, Relational Investors, a registered investment advisor, launched a proxy contest to gain two seats on the board of directors of Sovereign Bancorp. Relational accused Sovereign of operational mismanagement and poor corporate governance, representing a breach in fiduciary responsibility by...

Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big Five traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness,...

This case takes an inside look at CEO succession planning at Energy Corp. The case provides an overview of various models of succession planning, including external search, COO appointment, a horse race, and the inside-outside model. The case then outlines the process by which Energy Corp...

Retail grocery sales represent a significant portion of the U.S. economy. The industry was highly competitive, with companies operating on low gross and net margins. As a result, grocery stores were generally under significant pressure to reduce their operating costs in order to maintain...

This paper investigates the relationship between stock market trading volume and the autocorrelations of daily stock index returns. The paper finds that stock return autocorrelations tend to decline with trading volume. The paper explains this phenomenon using a model in which risk-averse...

More financially constrained firms are riskier and earn higher expected returns than less financially constrained firms, although this effect can be subsumed by size and book-to-market. Further, because the stochastic discount factor makes capital investment more procyclical, financial...

Previous work shows that the growth rate of industrial production is a common macroeconomic risk factor in the cross-section of expected returns. We demonstrate the connection between momentum profits and shifts in factor loadings on this macroeconomic variable. Winners have temporarily higher...