Managerial resistance precludes half of shareholder-initiated proposals from reaching the ballot stage. I construct a novel dataset of excluded and withdrawn proposals from the Securities and Exchange Commission's responses to managers' exclusion requests. An examination of announcement returns...

Some investment advisors offer multiple versions of a fund with the same manager and highly correlated returns. But these twinʺ funds are separate portfolios for different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Using a matched sample of retail and institutional twin...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...

We study the effects of diversifying funding sources on the financing conditions for firms. We exploit a regulatory reform that took place in Italy in 2012, i.e. the introduction of ‘minibonds’, which opened a new market-based funding opportunity for unlisted firms. Using the Italian Credit...

Does a diversification of funding sources affect the financing conditions for firms? To answer this question we study a regulatory reform which allowed unlisted firms to issue minibonds. Using the Italian Credit Register, we compare new loans granted to issuer firms with new loans concurrently...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...

A common method of valuing the equity in highly leveraged transactions is the flows-to-equity method. When applying this method various formulas can be used to calculate the time-varying cost of equity. In this paper we show that some commonly used formulas are inconsistent with the assumptions...

This paper analyzes the interaction between financial leverage and takeover activity. We develop a dynamic model of takeovers in which the financing strategies of bidding firms and the timing and terms of takeovers are jointly determined. In the paper, capital structure plays the role of a...

This paper evaluates the effect of shareholder passiveness on the market for corporate control. We find that firms with more passive shareholders (lower ownership per non-institutional shareholder) are less likely to be takeover targets, less likely to be acquired and command higher premiums....

Modern corporations use complex debt instruments and pursue acquisitions. In order to analyze the properties of some of these contracts in the event of an acquisition, this paper considers a company that has an incumbent capital structure, comprising one of five practically important structured...