This paper studies the short- and long-run announcement effects of declaring compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code (‘the Code’). We examine a unique, hand-collected data set of 317 German listed firms from 2002-2005. First, we present evidence from an analysis of firms’...

In the wake of the financial crisis, shareholders are increasingly relied upon to monitor directors. But while much has been written about directors' flawed judgments, remarkably little is known about shareholders' ability to make accurate judgments. What determines whether shareholders make the...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has...

This paper uses a triple difference approach to assess whether the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act predicts long-term changes in cross-listing premia of affected foreign firms. I measure cross-listing premia as the difference between the Tobin's q of a cross-listed company and a...

In mergers and acquisitions quot;fairness opinionsquot; are written evaluations of the financial terms of offers for target firms. We use simultaneous equations logit models to identify factors influencing the probabilities of firms obtaining third-party fairness opinions. We find that...

An audit committee with financial expertise is expected to strengthen the firms' internal control system, and consequently, contribute to reliable and relevant financial reporting. The controversial definition of financial expert was intensively commented on before the Securities and Exchange...

In the standard rhetoric of the corporate law literature, federalism is quot;the genius of American corporate lawquot; - an engine of efficiency, motivating a race (or at least a leisurely walk) to the top. Some have dissented, suggesting that the prevailing wisdom is wrong as to either the...

We examine conditional accounting conservatism (Basu, 1997) of UK firms cross-listed in the US. More specifically, we compare the degree of conservatism for UK cross-listed firms that raise equity capital versus conservatism of companies that do not raise equity capital. We expect that equity...

We examine the effect of the use of fairness opinions by acquirers on acquirers' short-term market performance. Our paper is the first to examine the effect of using fairness opinions on acquirers' abnormal returns around merger announcements. We hypothesize that acquirers purchase fairness...

Ascertaining which enforcement mechanisms work to protect investors has been both a focus of recent work in academic finance and an issue for policy-making at international development agencies. According to recent academic work, private enforcement of investor protection via both disclosure and...