Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...

We study how access to private equity financing affects real firm activities using a broad panel of publicly traded U.S. firms that raise external equity through private placements (PIPEs) between 1995 and 2008. The public firms relying on PIPEs are generally small, high-tech firms that cannot...

We review recent evidence and future directions for empirical research on financial contracting in the context of corporate finance. Specifically, we survey evidence pertaining to incentive conflicts, control rights, collateral, renegotiation, and interactions between financial contracts and...

Kathryn Judge of Columbia University documents how financial intermediaries persistently impose high fees compared to the value rendered, attributes this to political influence, and suggests countervailing policy strategies, including stoking competition and enhancing disclosure to reduce...

As a step towards understanding whether a private equity governance structure reduces overall agency conflicts relative to a public equity governance structure (as is often argued), this paper describes the contracts between private equity funds and investors, and the returns earned by...

This paper addresses the questions whether European mutual fund managers rely on sell-side analyst information and whether this behavior impacts fund performance. Results show that mutual funds significantly increase (decrease) their holdings in stocks when any of the consensus forecast measures...

We study whether Chinese CEOs with financial experience engage in more earnings management or less earnings management than those without such experience. In doing so, we distinguish between accrual-based earnings management and real earnings management. Overall, we find that CEOs with financial...

Canadian firms have different roots (e.g., more concentrated ownership and smaller size) than U.S. firms and Canadian regulatory enforcement follows a different route (principle- versus rule-based) that embodies the underlying intent of Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX). Financial restatements are more...

This paper examines the real effects of a recent phenomenon commonly referred to as “activist short-selling,” where short-sellers publicly talk down stocks to benefit their short positions. First, we show that after firms are targeted by activist short-sellers, their investing, financing,...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of blockholders (large shareholders) in corporate governance. We start with the underlying property rights of public corporations; we discuss how blockholders are critical in addressing free-rider problems and why, like...