We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary and continuous outcomes. Variation in parameters can produce either positive or negative...

We develop a model of internal governance where the self-serving actions of top management are limited by the potential reaction of subordinates. Internal governance can mitigate agency problems and ensure that firms have substantial value, even with little or no external governance by...

We examine deal-level data from 395 private equity transactions in Western Europe initiated by large private equity houses during the period 1991 to 2007. We un-lever the deal-level equity return and adjust for un-levered return to quoted peers to extract a measure of abnormal performance of the...

We show that female directors have a significant impact on board inputs and firm outcomes. In a sample of US firms, we find that female directors have better attendance records than male directors, male directors have fewer attendance problems the more gender-diverse the board is, and women are...

We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared to U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results...

We investigate how company-level corporate governance practices and country-level legal investor protection jointly affect company performance. We find that in any legal regime a few specific governance practices improve performance. Companies with good governance practices operating in...

This paper provides an evaluation of the substantive corporate governance mandates of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that is informed by the relevant empirical accounting and finance literature and the political dynamics that produced the mandates. The empirical literature provides a metric for...

This paper evaluates the primary mechanisms for changing management or obtaining control in publicly traded corporations with dispersed ownership. Specifically, we analyze and compare three mechanisms: (1) proxy fights (voting only); (2) takeover bids (buying shares only); and (3) a combination...

We use the reform process of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the impact of corporate governance reform on foreign exchange risk hedging, and find that the substantial improvements in governance standards reduced foreign exchange exposure and increased...

We examine U.S. dual and single class firms in 1980-2017, and document that the valuation difference between dual and single class firms varies over their life cycle. At the IPO, dual class firms have higher mean valuations than single-class firms, and we present evidence suggesting that this...