Going private transactions are often highly leveraged, and give rise to potential agency conflicts among existing shareholders. But who exactly are those shareholders, and under what legal conditions are these transaction more likely to occur? We examine ownership structure prior to going...

End-of-day stock price manipulation is generally associated with short-termism, long-term damage to equity values, and reduced incentives for employees to innovate. We use a sample of suspected stock price manipulation events based on intraday data for stocks from nine countries over eight...

This paper reviews recent literature on financial market institutions, governance, agency costs, and misconduct, and summarizes papers in this special issue. The papers contribute to the misconduct and governance literature in relation to the role of auditors, boards of directors, CEOs,...

Based on M&As from over 45 countries from 2003-2014, we show that the presence of end-of-day (EOD) target price manipulation prior to M&As increases the probability of an M&A deal withdrawal, and decreases the premium paid. More detailed exchange trading rules that govern manipulation across...

In this paper, we investigate the association between venture capital (VC) backing and internal control quality, as well as the effect of VC backing on the informativeness of material weaknesses in internal control disclosures. We find that VC-backed companies have stronger internal control...

Market manipulation are deliberate actions that affect trading activity and corporate policies. We conjecture that market manipulation has unintended consequences also for the ESG policies of the firm. Based on an international sample of monthly data from 2007 to 2018, the data indicate that the...

Firm managers make ethical decisions regarding the form and quality of disclosure. Disclosure can have long-term implications for performance, earnings manipulation, and even fraud. We investigate the impact of venture capital (VC) backing on the quality and informativeness of disclosure...

This paper examines the effect of unemployment risk on pension investment decisions of defined benefit (DB) pension plans. In particular, we examine whether unemployment insurance (UI) benefits result in increases in pension investment risk. Using fixed-effects and difference-in-difference...

This study examines the association between 10-K filing length and M&A returns. We posit that 10-K filing length influences shareholder information acquisition and processing costs. Longer 10-K filings reduce information acquisition costs by making more information about the target available to...

Using a comprehensive sample of cross-country mergers and acquisitions for the period 2000 to 2014 we examine the effect of common auditors on the efficiency of cross-country M&A transactions. We predict that the use of common auditors reduces uncertainty, resulting in higher M&A efficiency. We...