This paper studies the interaction between takeover defenses and product market competition. We find that firms in more competitive industries have more takeover defenses. This is the opposite result from what one would expect if takeover defenses always constitute an inefficient outcome that...

We study the relation between opportunistic timing of option grants and corporate governance failures, focusing on "lucky" grants awarded at the lowest price of the grant month. Option grant practices were designed to provide lucky grants not only to executives but also to independent directors....

While reformers have argued that multiple directorships for executives can destroy value, we investigate firms with executives that accept an outside directorship and find negative announcement returns only when the executive's firm has greater agency problems. When fewer agency concerns exist,...

Using recent data, we reject the hypothesis that the buyback anomalies first reported by Lakonishok and Vermaelen (1990, Journal of Finance 45:455--77) and Ikenberry, Lakonishok, and Vermaelen (1995, Journal of Financial Economics 39:181--208) have disappeared over time. We find evidence...

We focus on an exogenous event that changes the cost of capital of a company – the addition of its stock to the S&P 500 index – and investigate how companies react to it by modifying their corporate financial and investment policies. This allows us to test capital structure theories in an...

Standard Fama-French and Carhart models produce economically and statistically significant nonzero alphas, even for passive benchmark indices such as the S&P 500 and Russell 2000. We find that these alphas arise primarily from the disproportionate weight the Fama-French factors place on small...

This paper introduces measures of volatility and jump risk that are based on individual stock options to explain credit spreads on corporate bonds. Implied volatilities of individual options are shown to contain useful information for credit spreads and improve on historical volatilities when...

This study looks inside a large retail-banking group to understand how influence within the group affects internal capital allocations and lending behavior at the member bank level. The group consists of 181 member banks that jointly own a headquarters. Influence is measured by the divergence...