It is commonly believed that women are more likely to seek advice than men; for example, on aspects of health or asking for directions when lost. This paper investigates whether women’s relatively greater propensity for advice seeking extends to important business decisions, specifically those...

Adjustment of behavior to maintain risk, known as risk homeostasis, has previously been studied in a variety of psychological, health, social and economic contexts. This paper examines the evidence for risk homeostasis in corporate financial decisions involving mergers and acquisitions (M&As)....

Does director gender influence CEO empire building? Does it affect the bid premium paid for target firms? Less overconfident female directors less overestimate merger gains. As a result, firms with female directors are less likely to make acquisitions and if they do, pay lower bid premia. Using...

Using a large and unique patent-merger dataset over the period 1984 to 2006, we show that companies with large patent portfolios and low R&D expenses are acquirers, while companies with high R&D expenses and slow growth in patent output are target firms. Further, technological overlap between...

Using a large unique patent-merger dataset over the period 1984-2006, we uncover one specific source of synergies - corporate innovation activities - that drives acquisitions. Our measures of corporate innovation capture both quantity and quality of innovation output, as well as the extent of...

Using a unique data set tracking inventors' careers around mergers and acquisitions (M&As) over the period 19812012, we first show a steep increase postmerger in the frequency of collaboration between acquirer and target inventors, and that such collaboration is associated with more radical,...

Debt, and in particular, short-term debt have the potential to discipline managers. We examine the role of the board in making financing decisions that provide this discipline. Specifically, given a firm's characteristics, we predict that stronger boards will force the firm to hold more debt and...

We examine whether, how, and why acquirer shareholder voting matters. We show that acquirers with low institutional ownership, high deal risk, and high agency costs are more likely to bypass shareholder voting. Such acquirers have lower announcement returns and make higher offers than those who...

Using a sample of completed U.S. merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions over the period 1984-2014, we find that acquirer organization capital as measured by capitalized selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses is associated with superior deal performance. We show that high...

Using a new trademark-based product market competition measure and a novel trademark-merger dataset over the period 1983-2016, we show that companies facing greater product market competition are more likely to be acquirers. We further show that postmerger, compared to their non-acquiring peers,...