We study the role of financial strength on product market competition by examining exogenous shocks to a firm’s liability structure arising from asbestos litigation. We find that exogenous increases (decreases) in asbestos liabilities are interpreted by the market as negative (positive) news...

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...

We find a significant positive relation between a firm's advertising spending in the United States and its contemporaneous foreign cash flow. This relation holds even after controlling for factors that should be related to the optimal level of domestic advertising, and it is stronger for subsets...

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...

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 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...

A standard tool in economics and finance is the event study in which one examines the impact of an event on stock returns. While hundreds of such studies have been published, the concern here is with a small subset: the use of event studies to examine antitrust issues. After a brief review of...