Commercial banks acquire inside information about the firms they lend to. We study the impact of this informationally privileged position on the borrowing firm using a broad panel of U.S. firms over the 1993--2004 period. We measure the strength of the bank-firm relationship by bank-firm...

We study the role of institutional investors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that foreign institutional ownership is positively associated with the intensity of cross-border M&A activity worldwide. Foreign institutional ownership increases the probability that a merger...

We study holdings in merger and acquisition (M&A) targets by financial conglomerates in which affiliated investment banks advise the bidders. We show that advisors take positions in the targets before M&A announcements. These stakes are positively related to the probability of observing the bid...

Traditional portfolio balance theory derives a downward sloping currency demand function from limited international asset substitutability. Historically, this theory enjoyed little empirical support. We provide direct evidence by examining the exchange rate effect of a major redefinition of the...

We exploit the restrictions of intertemporal portfolio choice in the presence of nonfinancial income risk to test hedging using the information contained in the actual portfolio of the investor. We use a unique data set of Swedish investors with information broken down at the investor level and...

We study the effects of the controlling shareholders' portfolio diversification on the initial public offering (IPO) process. Less diversified shareholders have more to gain from taking their firm public, and are more willing to accept a lower price for shares. We test these hypotheses using the...

We study the effects of financial innovation in a model of endogenous information acquisition. We determine the conditions under which the introduction of a derivative written on an existing stock increases or decreases the incentive to purchase information. We show that financial innovation...

We study the impact of contractual incentives on the performance of mutual funds. We find that high-incentive contracts induce managers to take more risk and reduce the funds' probability of survival. Yet, funds with high-incentive contracts deliver higher risk-adjusted return, and the superior...

This article studies one of the potential causes of the financial market bubble of the late 1990s: the herding behavior of mutual funds. We show that the incentives contained in the mutual funds' advisory contracts induce managers to overcome their tendency to herd. We argue that investing in...