This paper investigates whether the U.S. repatriation tax for U.S. multinational corporations affects foreign investment. Our results show that the locked-out cash due to repatriation tax costs is associated with a higher likelihood of foreign (but not domestic) acquisitions. We also find a...

Using an experimental design that exploits exogenous reductions in coverage resulting from brokerage house mergers, we find that a reduction in coverage causes a deterioration in financial reporting quality. The effect of coverage on disclosure is more pronounced for firms with weak shareholder...

This paper investigates whether investor-level taxes affect corporate payout policy decisions. We predict and find a surge of special dividends in the final months of 2010 and 2012, immediately before individual-level dividend tax rates were expected to increase. We also find evidence that...

Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi (2008) show that firms with a high probability of default have abnormally low average future returns. We show that firms with a high potential for default (death) also tend to have a relatively high probability of extremely large (jackpot) payoffs. Consistent...

We investigate what stock return synchronicity reflects in terms of price informativeness by examining its effect on the pricing of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Based on 5,087 SEOs from 1984 to 2007, we find a significantly negative relation between stock return synchronicity (estimated as...

Using data from Securities and Exchange Commission filings, I show that the typical bank loan is renegotiated five times, or every nine months. The pricing, maturity, amount, and covenants are all significantly modified during each renegotiation, whose timing is governed by the financial health...

We propose a new role for private investments in public equity (PIPEs) as a mechanism to reduce coordination frictions among existing equity holders. We establish a causal link between the coordination ability of incumbent shareholders and PIPE issuance. This result obtains even after...

This paper provides benchmarks for monitoring costs and evaluates the net returns to shareholder activism. I model activism as a sequential decision process consisting of demand negotiations, board representation, and proxy contest and estimate the costs of each activism stage. A campaign ending...

A discontinuity, or kink, at zero in the hedge fund net return distribution has been interpreted as evidence of managers manipulating returns to avoid showing small losses. Instead, we propose alternative explanations for this phenomenon. In particular, we show that incentive fees can...

We examine whether the compensation incentives of top management affect the extent of risk shifting versus risk management behavior in pension plans. We find that risk shifting through pension underfunding (and, to a lesser extent, through pension asset allocation to risky securities) is...