A common view in the literature is that the director labor market provides an ex post settling-up for past decisions by rewarding CEO ability and actions that are consistent with shareholder interests. In this paper we focus on large CEO acquisition decisions to investigate whether the director...

About half of all merger deals between public US acquirers and targets involve a conference call within two days of the deal announcement, in order to communicate information to both acquirer and target shareholders to garner voting support and mitigate legal liability. Calls are associated with...

We identify important conflicts of interests among shareholders and examine their effects on corporate decisions. When a firm is considering an action that affects other firms in its shareholders' portfolios, shareholders with heterogeneous portfolios may disagree about whether to proceed. This...

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 explore whether compensation policies in bidding firms counter or exacerbate agency conflicts by examining CEO pay and incentives around corporate takeovers. We find that even in mergers where bidding shareholders are worse off, bidding CEOs are better off three quarters of the time. In fact,...

We examine the relation between the management of cash holdings and corporate governance. We find that firms with weaker corporate governance have smaller cash reserves. Further tests suggest that these firms dissipate their cash reserves more quickly than do managers of firms with stronger...

We examine the relation between the management of cash holdings and corporate governance. Using governance metrics based on antitakeover provisions and inside ownership, we find that firms with weaker corporate governance structures have smaller cash reserves. When distributing cash to...

Aggregate merger waves could be due to market timing or to clustering of industry shocks for which mergers facilitate change to the new environment. This study finds that economic, regulatory or technological shocks drive industry merger waves. However, the degree of capital liquidity determines...

The economic links between firms created by customer and supplier relationships are critical determinants of those firms' values and actions. We demonstrate that significant trade relationships and indirect economic links incrementally explain which firms are more likely to be involved in...

We provide evidence that managers and controlling shareholders time management buyouts (MBOs) and freezeout transactions to take advantage of industry-wide undervaluation. Portfolios of industry peers of MBO and freezeout targets show significant alphas of around 1% per month over the 12-month...