Minority shareholdings have been on the regulatory agenda of competition authorities for some time. Recent empirical studies, however, draw attention to a new, thought provoking theory of harm: common ownership by institutional investors holding small, parallel equity positions in several...

Through dozens of studies, economists have accumulated considerable evidence and knowledge on the effects of the takeover market. Most of the earlier work is well summarized elsewhere (Jensen and Ruback (1983); Jensen (1984); Jarrell, Brickley and Netter (1988)). Here, I focus on current aspects...

The interests and incentives of managers and shareholders conflict over such issues as the optimal size of the firm and the payment of cash to shareholders. These conflicts are especially severe in firms with large free cash flows--more cash than profitable investment opportunities. The theory...

The conventional view of corporate governance is that it is a neutral set of processes and practices that govern how a company is managed. We demonstrate that this view is profoundly mistaken: in the United States, corporate governance has become a “system” composed of an array of...

Firms undertake a variety of actions to reduce risk through diversification, including entering diverse lines of business, taking on project partners, and maintaining portfolios of risky projects such as Ramp;D or natural resource exploration. By a well-known argument, securities holders do not...

This study examines the impact of shared analyst coverage on the comparability of financial statements. Analysts form information expectations based on the portfolio of firms they follow. I document that managers cater to analyst information expectations by increasing the comparability of their...

An important set of contract terms manages potential disputes. In a detailed, hand-coded sample of mergers and acquisition (M&A) contracts from 2007 and 2008, dispute management provisions in correlate strongly with target ownership, state of incorporation, and industry, and with the experience...

An important set of contract terms manages potential disputes. In a detailed, hand-coded sample of mergers and acquisition (M&A) contracts from 2007 and 2008, dispute management provisions correlate strongly with target ownership, state of incorporation, and industry, and with the experience of...