We assemble a sample of over 10,000 customer-supplier relationships and determine whether the customer owns equity in the supplier. We find that factors related to both contractual incompleteness and financial market frictions are important in the decision of a customer firm to take an equity...

Accelerated share repurchases (ASRs) are credible commitments by firms to repurchase shares immediately. Including an ASR in a repurchase program reduces the flexibility that firms have to alter an announced program in response to subsequent changes in the price and liquidity of its shares,...

We examine the effect of corporate diversification on the equity-issue process in a sample of 641 equity issues from 1983 to 1994. We find that issues by diversified firms are viewed less negatively by the market than are issues by focused firms. This finding supports the hypothesis that...

We study advertising at the brand level in a sample of corporate acquisitions. New owners display an elevated propensity to sharply cut advertising in acquired brands. This behavior is most pronounced in private equity transactions. When a buyer's existing brands overlap with the acquired...

In a large panel of Compustat firms, we find that firm policy changes after exogenous CEO departures do not display abnormally high levels of variability, casting doubt on the presence of idiosyncratic-style effects in policy choices. After endogenous CEO departures, we do detect abnormally...

We examine the relation between business school dean turnover and MBA program rankings from 1990-2002. We find little evidence that dean departures are related to changes in a school’s overall rank in the US News & World Report rankings. However, dean turnover increases following drops in the...