My dissertation focuses on the incentives from executive stock and stock option ownership, how these incentives affect the welfare of firms different stakeholders, and how these stakeholders respond. In the first chapter, I investigate whether CEO stock and stock option ownership affects firms...

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first chapter examines the valuation effect of information asymmetry and the role of financial intermediaries as information gathering and processing experts. In a sample of cross-border mergers and acquisitions made by U.S. firms, we find that...

The generally weak correlation between board independence and firm performance is a major empirical puzzle. One possible explanation is that director independence alone is not enough. To explore this possibility, we examine the full employment histories of independent directors at S&P 1500...

This dissertation studies the distributions of treatment effects in switching regimes models (SRMs). First, we propose a general class of SRMs and provide simple estimators of average treatment effects. Second, we establish sharp bounds on the joint distribution of potential outcomes and the...

This dissertation studies price discovery processes, stock order imbalances, and trading patterns around seasoned equity offerings. First chapter studies how the volatility of a stock is affected by the trading activity of other stocks. I construct a model of price discovery process after a...