We investigate the relation between family ownership and the informational content of short sales in U.S. publicly-traded firms. Our analysis indicates that family firms, in aggregate, experience a substantially higher volume of abnormal short sales prior to negative earnings shocks than...

Conventional wisdom suggests that family shareholders should exit their large, concentrated equity stakes in publicly traded firms and seek benefits arising from diversification. However, founding families maintain a substantive and undiversified stake in many publicly traded U.S. firms. The...

Creditor reliance on accounting-based debt covenants suggests that debtors are potentially concerned with board of director characteristics that influence the financial accounting process. In a sample of Samp;P 500 firms, we find that the cost of debt financing is inversely related to board...

We investigate the impact of founding-family ownership structure on the agency cost of debt. We find that founding-family ownership is common in large, publicly traded firms and is related, both statistically and economically, to a lower cost of debt financing. The evidence also indicates that...

Motivated by the potential for opportunistic behavior in pay decisions, recent SEC and IRS regulations essentially preclude inside directors from serving on a firm's compensation committee. In this paper, we examine whether greater compensation committee independence promotes shareholder...

We provide evidence on operating performance changes at a sample of U.S. banks acquired by non-U.S. banking organizations over the 1980-2001 period. Our sample allows us to compare directly the pre-acquisition performance of the targets with their post acquisition performance, a comparison that...

Securitization of the residential mortgage market has completely transformed the process of financing home loans in the U.S. over the last two decades. We examine the effects of securitization on yield spreads in the primary mortgage market. Cointegration techniques are employed to test the...

This paper extends prior work on the links between political patronage and capital structure in developing economies. Three proxies of political patronage are developed and applied to a group of Malaysian firms over a 10-year period. We find a positive and significant link between leverage and...

We employ a natural experiment from the 1980s, predating the ubiquitous clamor for independence influenced corporate governance structures, to examine which governance mechanisms are associated with firm survival and failure. We find that thrifts were more likely to survive the thrift crisis...

We assess the effects on the welfare of corporate borrowers of the recent wave of bank consolidations in the United States that has produced a small number of very large banks. Our evidence from a sample of more than 3,000 commercial borrowers from banks involved in large mergers indicates that...