This paper examines the effect of the benefits of corporate control to managers on the relationship between managerial ownership and the stock returns of acquiring firms in corporate control transactions. At low levels of managerial ownership, agency costs of equity (such as perquisite...

This paper documents for a sample of 327 US acquisitions between 1975 and 1987 three forces that systematically reduce the announcement day return of bidding firms. The returns to bidding shareholders are lower when their firm diversifies, when it buys a rapidly growing target , and when the...

Both managerial ownership and performance are endogenously determined by exogenous (and only partly observed) changes in the firm's contracting environment. We extend the cross-sectional results of Demsetz and Lehn (1985) and use panel data to show that managerial ownership is explained by key...

What makes independent directors perform their monitoring duty? One possible reason is that they are worried about being sanctioned by regulators if they do not monitor sufficiently well. Using unique features of the Chinese financial market, we estimate the extent to which independent...

CEOs of public companies have influence over the political spending of their firms, which has been attracting significant attention since the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. Furthermore, the policy views expressed by CEOs receive substantial consideration from policymakers and the...

Stock prices are more informative when the information has less social value. Speculators with limited resources making costly (private) information production decisions must decide to produce information about some firms and not others. We show that producing and trading on private information...

Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the U.S. follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of 'superstars' enjoy the bulk of the rewards. We evaluate the impact of CEOs achieving superstar status on the performance of their firms, using prestigious business awards to...

We investigate the relationship between CEO centrality -- the relative importance of the CEO within the top executive team in terms of ability, contribution, or power -- and the value and behavior of public firms. Our proxy for CEO centrality is the fraction of the top-five compensation captured...