We develop a theory of bank board risk committees. With this theory, such committees are valuable even though there is no expectation that bank risk is lower if the bank has a well-functioning risk committee. As predicted by our theory (1) many large and complex banks voluntarily chose to have a...

Inducing firms to make specialized investments through bilateral contracts can be challenging because of potential holdup problems. Such contracting difficulties have long been argued to be an important reason for acquisitions. To evaluate the extent to which this motivation leads to mergers, we...

This paper provides an introduction to buyouts and the academic literature about them. Buyouts are initiated by “buyout funds”, which are limited partnerships raised from mostly institutional investors. The funds earn returns for their investors by improving the operations of the firms they...

Firms often broadcast commitments to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, but do these commitments reflect their internal practices? To find out, I introduce an inside measure of ESG practices from 10 million employee reviews via a word-embedding model. The measure predicts a...

We study how ownership structure, in particular public listing status, relates to workplace safety and productivity tradeoffs. Theory offers competing hypotheses on how listing-related frictions affect these tradeoffs. We exploit detailed asset-level data in the U.S. coal industry and find that...

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...

We study restructuring by firms whose stock prices experience a sharp decline to a low price level– fallen angels. In response to a price decline, firms can retrench by reducing investments and cutting the workforce, or increase leverage and investments hoping for lottery-like payoffs. We find...

What makes independent directors perform their monitoring duty? One possible reason is that they are concerned 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...

Managers often claim that an important source of value in acquisitions is the acquiring firm's ability to finance investments for the target firm. This claim implies that targets are financially constrained prior to being acquired and that these constraints are eased following the acquisition....

Panel OLS and GMM-IV estimates indicate that executives respond to the adoption of a compensation clawback provision by decreasing firm risk. The mechanisms that transmit incentives to decisions and decisions to risk appear to be more conservative investment and financial policies and preemptive...