This paper studies institutional investors' incentives to be engaged shareholders. We measure incentives as the increase in an institution's cash flow (management fees) when a stockholding increases 1% in value, considering both the direct effect on assets under management and the indirect...

A growing body of evidence concludes that common ownership caused cooperation among firms to increase and competition to decrease. We take a closer look at four approaches used to identify these effects. We find that the effects the literature has attributed to common ownership are caused by...

This paper explores the impact of target CEOs' retirement preferences on the incidence, the pricing, and the outcomes of takeover bids. Mergers frequently force target CEOs to retire early, and CEOs' private merger costs are the forgone benefits of staying employed until the planned retirement...

We document a significant but declining size effect and cyclicality in sales growth within U.S. public firms, including the COVID crisis. The patterns differ significantly from those documented in prior studies which focus on samples dominated by private firms. Small public firms grow faster...

This paper studies the cross-sectional properties of return forecasts derived from Fama-MacBeth regressions. These forecasts mimic how an investor could, in real time, combine many firm characteristics to obtain a composite estimate of a stock's expected return. Empirically, the forecasts vary...

We test whether investment explains the accrual anomaly by distinguishing between accruals related to new investment and so-called ‘nontransaction' accruals, items such as depreciation and asset write-downs that do not represent new investment expenditures. The two types of accruals have very...