While there is widespread concern that target CEO retention by a private equity acquirer can result in a lower premium for target shareholders because of the potential conflict of interest of the CEO, it is also possible that target shareholders could benefit from CEO retention because it can...

As firms have more assets in place, more of management's limited attention is focused on managing assets in place rather than developing new growth options. Consequently, as firms grow older, they have fewer growth options and a lower ability to generate new growth options. This simple theory...

We analyze a comprehensive sample of more than 10,000 U.S. OTC stocks. We first show that the OTC market is a large, diverse, and dynamic trading environment with a rich set of regulatory and disclosure regimes, comprising venue rules and state laws beyond SEC regulation. We then exploit this...

This paper reexamines the empirical evidence on the cash flow sensitivity of cash presented by Almeida, Campello, and Weisbach (2004). The original paper introduces a model in which financially constrained firms choose to save cash out of incremental cash flows but financially unconstrained do...

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...

Using detailed project-level data, we document a novel mechanism through which information externalities distort investment. Firms anticipate information spillover from peers’ investment decisions and delay project exercise to learn from their peers’ outcomes. To establish a causal...

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 the effects of stock price informativeness (SPI) on the complexity of executive compensation. Using textual analysis of SEC proxy statements to construct measures of compensation complexity, we find informative stock prices reduce pay complexity. Using mutual fund redemption as an...