This article examines how the benefits to managers of corporate control affect the relationship between the ownership and the stock returns of acquiring firms. At low levels of managerial ownership, agency costs of equity (such as perquisite consumption) reduce acquirer returns. At high levels...

This article formalizes the intuition that equity provides firms with a cushion against aggregate fluctuations. We show that equity allows a firm to share aggregate risks with its creditors, minimizing the chance that a recession could push it into financial distress. The tax bias against equity...

Using a newly constructed panel data base, we examine changes in price-cost margins in 284 manufacturing industries between 1958 and 1981. A key finding is a dramatic narrowing of the spread between the margins of concentrated and unconcentrated industries over this period. We provide evidence...