This paper shows how chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics affect the performance of acquirers in diversifying takeovers. When the acquirer's CEO has previous experience in the target industry, the acquirer's abnormal announcement returns are between 1.2 and 2.0 percentage points larger...

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in strategically timing their trades and SEC filings, for example, by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements...

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in strategically timing their trades and SEC filings, for example, by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements...

We show that country characteristics explain most of the cross-sectional variation in bank board independence. In contrast, country characteristics have little explanatory power for the fraction of outside bank directors with experience in the banking industry. Exploiting the time-series...

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes–Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in strategically timing their trades and SEC filings, e.g., by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements were...

In the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley era corporate insiders were required to report trades in shares of their firm until the 10th of the month following the trade. This gave them considerable flexibility to time their trades and reports strategically, e.g., by executing a sequence of trades and reporting...

We study CEOs with a career background in finance. Firms with financial expert CEOs hold less cash, more debt, and engage in more share repurchases. Financial expert CEOs are more financially sophisticated: they are less likely to use one companywide discount rate instead of a project-specific...

We show that long-term compensation is associated with higher pay in the financial industry and this association is stronger in markets with high competition for talent. We argue that this evidence supports models of competition for talent based on retention motives.

Better mechanisms are needed for evaluating important market and non-market effects of large technological programmes that are not properly captured by existing methods. This paper presents a framework that permits the direct and indirect economic effects from large R&D programmes to be...

We study how, at times of CEO transitions, the identity of the CEO successor shapes labor contracts within family firms. We propose an alternate view of how family management might underperform relative to external management in family firms. The idea developed in this paper is that, in contrast...