We show that a large number of firms adopt poison pills during periods of market turmoil. In particular, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, many firms adopted poison pills in response to declines in valuations, and stock prices increased upon their announcements. This increase is driven...

Institutional investors vote corporate proxies on behalf of underlying investors and beneficiaries. We show a strong relation between this voting and public opinion on corporate governance (as reflected in media coverage and surveys), with similarly strong results for voting by mutual funds. We...

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...

While executive compensation is often blamed for the excessive risk taking by banks, little is known about the operating performance incentives used in the finance industry both prior to and subsequent to the recent crisis. We provide a comprehensive analysis of incentive design -- the link of...

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...

Uncertainty about management appears to affect firms' cost of borrowing and financial policies. In a sample of S&P 1500 firms between 1987 and 2010, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all decline over the first three years of CEO tenure, holding other macroeconomic, firm, and...

Management risk occurs because uncertainty about future managerial decisions increases a firm's overall risk. This paper documents the importance of management risk in determining firms' cost of borrowing. CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all increase at the time of CEO turnover,...

We evaluate whether management risk, coming from uncertainty about management's value added, affects firms' default risks and debt pricing. We find that, regardless of the reason for the turnover, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all increase at the time of management turnover,...

We provide evidence that CEO equity incentives, especially stock options, influence stock liquidity risk via information disclosure quality. We document a negative association between CEO options and the quality of future managerial disclosure policy. Contributing to the literature on CEO...

A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns....