If outside directors with backgrounds in politics and in law play a political role, they will be more important on the boards of firms for which politics matters more. We conduct three tests. First, for a sample of manufacturing firms, we find that politically experienced directors are more...

This paper empirically examines whether certain corporate governance mechanisms are related to the probability of a company restating its earnings. We examine a sample of 159 U.S. public companies that restated earnings and an industry-size matched sample of control firms. We have assembled a...

Fraud scandals can create incentives to change managers in an attempt to improve the firm's performance, recover lost reputational capital, or limit the firm's exposure to liabilities that arise from the fraud. It also is possible that the revelation of fraud creates incentives to change the...

We examine whether conflicts of interest with investment banking and brokerage businesses induce sell-side analysts to issue optimistic stock recommendations and, if so, whether investors are misled by such biases. Using quantitative measures of potential conflicts constructed from a novel data...

We examine the determinants of merging firms’ choice of a common or separate mergers and acquisitions adviser and the consequences of this choice on several deal outcomes. In a large sample of acquisitions, common advisers appear to be chosen in economically sensible ways. After controlling...