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...

This paper documents how traditional and shadow banks interacted with one another during the 2007 financial crisis, when both assets and liabilities flew from shadow to traditional banks. To rationalize their behavior, we propose a simple model which demonstrates the symbiotic coexistence and...

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...

New technology promises to expand the supply of financial services to small businesses poorly served by the banking system. Does it succeed? We study the response of FinTech to financial services demand created by the introduction of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). We find that FinTech is...

Why do some firms enter a new sector by acquiring an existing company ("buy"), while others do so using their existing resources ("build")? Using a novel dataset constructed by merging French employer payrolls with commercial M&A datasets, we show that firms are more likely to buy when their...

We examine the labor market consequences for directors who adopt poison pills. Directors who become associated with pill adoption experience significant decreases in vote margins and increases in termination rates across all their directorships. They also experience a decrease in the likelihood...

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...