We use the 2003 NYSE and NASDAQ listing rules concerning board and committee independence as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the causal relations between board structure and CEO monitoring. Noncompliant firms forced to raise board independence or adopt a fully independent nominating...

This study compares CEO employment contracts across two common law countries: the United States and Australia. Although the regulatory regimes of these jurisdictions enjoy many comparable features, there are also some important institutional differences in terms of capital market, tax, and...

We study reputation incentives in the director labor market and find that directors with multiple directorships distribute their effort unequally based on the directorship's relative prestige. When directors experience an exogenous increase in a directorship's relative ranking, their board...

We examine the benefits and costs associated with foreign independent directors (FIDs) at U.S. corporations. We find that firms with FIDs make better cross-border acquisitions when the targets are from the home regions of FIDs. However, FIDs also display poor board meeting attendance records and...

Using hand-collected data, we examine the targeting of shareholder class action lawsuits in merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions, and the associations of these lawsuits with offer completion rates and takeover premia. We find that M&A offers subject to shareholder lawsuits are completed at...

We examine the economic benefits of acquisitions of U.S. public firms. Estimating revelation biases concerning internal investment opportunities, we find that it produces a significant negative bidder announcement effect, often interpreted as shareholder wealth destruction. Examining exogenously...

We study a wide-spread yet unexplored corporate governance phenomenon: the pledging of company stock by insiders as collateral for personal bank loans. Utilizing a regulatory change that exogenously decreases pledging, we document a negative causal impact of pledging on shareholder wealth. We...

We examine the expected economic benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We conclude that both signaling and revelation biases are responsible for the commonly reported finding that on average takeovers are harmful to bidder shareholder wealth. After accounting for these two biases that lead to a...

Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. mergers and acquisitions (M&A) bids over 1990-2008, we document that top market share law firms are associated with a number of important bid outcomes and characteristics. Top bidder law firms are associated with significantly higher offer completion rates...

We investigate the corporate governance of venture capital (VC) backed IPOs that enter into strategic alliances. Startups can have alliances with outside strategic partners and with parents of corporate VCs (CVCs), who primarily invest in startups for strategic reasons. Both CVCs and outside...