One of the most consequential events in any firm’s lifetime is a major acquisition. Because of their importance, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been an enormous area of research. However, the vast majority of this research and survey papers summarizing this research have focused on...

Despite the fact that one-third of worldwide mergers involve firms from different countries, the vast majority of the academic literature on mergers studies domestic mergers. What little has been written about cross-border mergers has focused on public firms, usually from the United States. Yet,...

How does global warming affect firms' activities? We consider this issue from the perspective of theelectricity producing industry. Warmer temperatures increase the demand for air conditioning, the use of which fluctuates substantially over time, making investments in “flexible” power plants...

An increasing fraction of firms worldwide operate in multiple countries. We study the costs and benefits of being multinational in firms' corporate financial decisions and survey the related academic evidence. We document that, among U.S. publicly traded firms, the prevalence of multinationals...

This paper examines distortions in corporate investment decisions when a new project changes firm risk. It presents a dynamic model in which a self-interested, risk-averse manager makes investment decisions at a levered firm. The model, calibrated using data from public firms, is used to...

This paper analyzes the process of private negotiations between financial institutions and the companies they attempt to influence. It relies on a private database consisting of the correspondence between TIAA-CREF and 45 firms it contacted about governance issues between 1992 and 1996. This...

We study a model in which future financing constraints leas firms to have a preference for investments with sorter payback periods, investments with less risk, and investments that utilize more pledgeable assets. The model also shows how investment distortions towards more liquid, safer assets...

This paper examines the view that non-U.S. firms cross-list in the United States to increase protection of their minority shareholders. We find that firms from French Civil Law countries, which have relatively weak protections for minority shareholders, are more likely to cross-list on an...

An objective of many proposed corporate governance reforms is increased transparency. This goal has been relatively uncontroversial, as most observers believe increased transparency to be unambiguously good. We argue that, from a corporate governance perspective, there are likely to be both...

This paper proposes a theory of corporate liquidity demand and provides new evidence on corporate cash policies. Firms have access to valuable investment opportunities, but potentially cannot fund them with the use of external finance. Firms that are financially unconstrained can undertake all...