The first striking feature is that ownership of the average UK company is diffuse: a coalition of at least eight shareholders is required to reach an absolute majority of voting rights. Even though the average firm has a dispersed ownership, the reader should bear in mind that there are about...

We study whether CEO political ideology affected how S&P 500 firms reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, an exogenous shock to demand and supply. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs are more likely to adopt shareholder-friendly than employee-friendly reactions to the pandemic. Hence, they should...

Exploiting the 2009 amendments to Regulation S-K, we provide unique evidence on the first-time disclosure of the reasons firms state for combining (separating) the roles of CEO and chairman. The stated reasons support both agency theory and organization theory. They are more numerous and...

While empirical studies that use event-study methodology find on average that the gains from mergers and acquisitions are positive, those focusing on accounting figures tend to find a significant drop in performance. We argue that each of the four possible combinations between positive or...

While empirical studies that use event-study methodology find on average that the gains from mergers and acquisitions are positive, those focusing on accounting figures tend to find a significant drop in performance. We argue that each of the four possible combinations between positive or...

This paper investigates whether investment spending of firms is sensitive to the availability of internal funds. Imperfect capital markets create a hierarchy for the different sources of funds such that investment and financial decisions are not independent. The relation between corporate...

We examine the price, volume and bid-ask spread reactions to lock-in expiries in Hong Kong IPOs. We show that the lock-in expiry causes an increase in both trading volume and bid–ask spread, but no significant change in the share price. We attribute the absence of a price reaction to the fact...

This study investigates the employment consequences of private equity acquisitions, in particular institutional buy-outs (IBOs), in the UK. It involves a pre- and post-acquisition analysis of employment and performance characteristics for a sample of acquired firms and a matched sample of...

This paper studies the two potentially contrasting effects on IPO pricing and post-IPO operating performance of family ties as well as social ties the top management has with board members. While family ties may solve manager-owner conflicts of interests, they may also give rise to...

We examine the link between CEO overconfidence and speed of adjustment (SOA) of cash holdings for listed US firms. We find a negative effect of overconfident CEOs on the SOA. Further, CEO overconfidence increases the asymmetry in the SOA between firms with excess cash and those with a cash...