In practice, open-market stock repurchase programs outnumber self tender offers by approximately ten to one. This evidence is puzzling given that tender offers are more efficient in disbursing free cash and in signaling undervaluation - the two main motivations suggested in the literature for...

This paper explores the impact of target CEOs' retirement preferences on takeovers. Using retirement age as proxy for CEOs' private merger costs, we find strong evidence that target CEOs' preferences affect merger activity. The likelihood of receiving a successful takeover bid is sharply higher...

I provide evidence of actual stock repurchases increasing future investment in firms subject to strong asymmetric information that are reliant on external capital markets. To address endogeneity, I use an instrumental variables approach based on price pressures created by mutual funds' liquidity...

We argue that the state-law rules governing poison pills are vulnerable to challenges based on preemption by the Williams Act. Such challenges, we show, could well have a major impact on the corporate-law landscape.The Williams Act established a federal regime regulating unsolicited tender...

Previous studies suggest that the market perceives IPOs as bad news (i.e., competitive threats) to existing firms in the same industry. At the same time, the market has a tendency to be overly optimistic about IPO prospects, especially during hot IPO markets. Thus, the negative industry rival...

Investor-driven "short-termism" is said to harm EU public firms' ability to invest for the long term, prompting calls for the EU to better insulate managers from shareholder pressure. But the evidence offered---rising levels of repurchases and dividends---is incomplete and misleading: it ignores...

The fastest growing segment of private equity deals are secondary buyouts - sales from one PE fund to another. Using a comprehensive sample of leveraged buyouts we investigate whether SBOs are value-maximizing, or reflect opportunistic behavior. To proxy for adverse incentives, we develop buy...

We present evidence that share repurchases reduce investment inefficiencies related to short-term investors. Using U.S. data from 1988 to 2018, we first document that stock buybacks are associated with lower long-term investments. However, contrary to popular perception that buybacks sacrifice...

We study how growth-promoting bonuses - bonuses that are explicitly tied to size measures such as sales - impact firms' acquisition activity. Firms whose executives are granted growth-promoting bonuses are more likely to do acquisitions. Acquisitions by such firms tend to destroy value for...

This survey introduces a two-volume, 1,900-page reprint collection of articles recently published by Elsevier/North-Holland journals. Volume 1 begins with a comprehensive overview of the empirical evidence, followed by introductions to the econometrics of event studies and various techniques for...