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 study the contribution of directors to firm resilience by assessing the relative importance of their advisory and monitoring roles at times of crisis. Based on manually collected US data, we document that four bord-related variables affect market reactions around disruptive events. Board...

We examine the link between CEO overconfidence and speed of adjustment (SOA) of cash holdings for listed US firms. We find a negative effect of overconfident CEOs on the SOA. Further, CEO overconfidence increases the asymmetry in the SOA between firms with excess cash and those with a cash...

Stricter enforcement of post-employment restrictions that strengthens trade secrets protection also limits CEOs' alternative employment opportunities. We find that such mobility restrictions, which heightened CEO career concerns can dampen their risk-taking incentives and distort corporate...

Using a novel text-based measure of top management team diversity, covering over 70,000 top executives in over 6,500 U.S. firms from 1999 to 2014, we show that analyst forecasts are systematically more pessimistic for firms with more diverse top management teams ("diverse firms"), especially for...

We study the nature of and outcomes from coordinated engagements by a prominent international network of long-term shareholders cooperating to influence firms on environmental and social issues. A two-tier engagement strategy, combining lead investors with supporting investors, is effective in...

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides a crucial social safety net to workers as seen during the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper examines UI effects on takeover markets. We find that higher target state UI benefits raise acquisition likelihoods, deal synergies, and gains to acquirer and target...

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...