This article tests for differences in execution costs among specialist firms for New York Stock Exchange listed securities. Execution cost differences provide a measure of the relative performance of specialist firms. The authors find a substantial difference in effective spreads and order...

This paper investigates how a foreign firm's decision to cross-list on a U.S. stock exchange is related to the consumption of private benefits of control by its controlling shareholders. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to choose...

Acquiring-firm shareholders lost 12 cents around acquisition announcements per dollar spent on acquisitions for a total loss of $240 billion from 1998 through 2001, whereas they lost $7 billion in all of the 1980s, or 1.6 cents per dollar spent. The 1998 to 2001 aggregate dollar loss of...

We examine the evolution of insider ownership of IPO firms from 1970 to 2001 to understand how U.S. firms become widely held. A majority of these firms has insider ownership below 20% after 10 years. Stock market performance and liquidity play an extremely important role in ownership dynamics....

The average cash-to-assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms more than doubles from 1980 to 2006. A measure of the economic importance of this increase is that at the end of the sample period, the average firm can retire all debt obligations with its cash holdings. Cash ratios increase because...

Despite the dramatic reduction in explicit barriers to international investment activity over the last 60 years, the impact of financial globalization has been surprisingly limited. I argue that country attributes are still critical to financial decision-making because of "twin agency problems"...

Foreign firms terminate their Securities and Exchange Commission registration in the aftermath of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) because they no longer require outside funds to finance growth opportunities. Deregistering firms' insiders benefit from greater discretion to consume private benefits...