To examine the impact of acquisition announcements on the stock market returns of rivals of the acquiring firms, we propose a growth probability hypothesis: When an acquisition is announced, it signals the potential for future growth in the acquirer's industry to the market, resulting in...

We address the mixed empirical findings on how corporate governance affects dividend payout policy by analyzing a large sample of firms from 30 countries. Our results indicate that firms with better firm-level governance pay more dividends, even when we control for country-level governance....

We examine whether personality differences between the CEO and CFO influence audit fees. Audit fees should reflect engagement risk associated with a client. We use personality differences between the CEO and CFO as a proxy for potential poor communication, reluctance to share information, and...

Previous research on international mergers and acquisitions has not looked at the valuation consequences of international acquisitions by firms from a developing economy. This study examines the announcement effect and the post-acquisition long-term performance of 96 Indian international...

We examine whether CEO extraversion, an important personality trait associated with leadership, affects firms' expected cost of equity capital. We measure CEO extraversion using CEOs' speech patterns during the unscripted portion of conference calls. After controlling for several CEO and firm...

We use actual negotiations between angel investors and entrepreneurs to study the impact of personal characteristics on investment outcomes. We construct a unique dataset with 707 investment requests led by 1,089 entrepreneurs and find that the personal characteristics of the entrepreneur,...

We examine the effectiveness of corporate governance in monitoring private in-house meetings between management and investors. Consistent with better corporate governance curbing the opportunistic corporate disclosure and insider trading behavior, we find a negative association between...

The practice of CEOs serving on the boards of other firms has raised concerns from investors and proxy advisory firms about the potential harm to shareholders of CEOs' own firms. I find that holding just one outside directorship benefits shareholders while holding multiple directorships results...

We investigate the impact of political connection on corporate risk-taking by connected firms, their industry counterparts, as well as non-rival firms from 48 countries. We find that political connection induces higher risk taking by connected firms. By contrast, we do not find evidence that...