We open the black box of the M&A decision process by constructing a comprehensive sample of US firms with specialized M&A staff. We investigate whether specialized M&A staff improves acquisition performance or facilitates managerial empire building instead. We find that firms with specialized...

Venture capital (VC) backed firms face neither the governance requirements nor a major separation of ownership and control of their public peers. These differences suggest that independent directors could play a unique role on private firm boards. This paper explores the dynamics of VC-backed...

We draw on new data and theory to examine how private market contracts adapt to serve multiple goals, particularly the social-benefit goals that impact funds add to their financial goals. Counter to the intuition from multitasking models (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991), few impact funds tie...

We develop a model of freeze-out merger and tender offers and test it in an economy where merger and tender regulation are extremely different. Using a relatively large sample of 329 freeze-out offers in Israel during 2000-2019, we document evidence consistent with the model. We also find that...

We show that the main claim in Dennis, Gerardi, and Schenone (JF forthcoming) (DGS), namely "that the documented positive correlation between common ownership and ticket prices stems from the market share component of the common ownership measure, and not the ownership and control components,"...

We analyze voting records for management proposals and find that investors today hold directors accountable for a much wider range of issues, such as climate change and board diversity, than in the past. Within environment, climate change is the only subcategory that is significantly associated...

This paper studies optimal executive pay when the CEO is concerned about fairness: if his wage falls below a perceived fair share of output, the CEO suffers disutility that is increasing in the discrepancy. Fairness concerns do not lead to fair wages always being paid -- to induce effort, the...

We create a new measure called director-specific quality (DSQ) that captures the collection of value-relevant transferable attributes unique to a director and explains 10% of the variation in firm value. Directors with higher DSQ receive greater voter support, and investors respond more (less)...

We find that the difference between the mean return on assets of all Norwegian family firms and nonfamily firms is 1.4 percentage points and positive every year over twenty years. This family firm premium increases when the family as a whole owns a higher equity stake, has fewer owning members,...

The increasing adoption of dual-class shares (DCS)—an ownership structure that gives corporate insiders greater voting power than other shareholders—among newly listed companies has raised significant governance concerns. We investigate the decision to adopt the DCS structure and its value...