We address whether mutual funds act effectively through the proxy voting process by supporting wealth increasing items. We examine 212,620 voting decisions made by 1,794 mutual funds from 94 fund families for 1,047 shareholder proposals voted on between July 2003 and June 2005. We find that...

This paper studies the first day return of 227 carve-outs during 1996-2013. I find that the first day return of newly issued subsidiary stocks is explained by the reporting distortions in the pre IPO period, conditioned on whether the executives and directors of the subsidiary received stock...

This study examines the ex-post consequences of CEO compensation for shareholder value. The main objective is to explore whether companies that pay their CEO excessive fees (in comparison to those of peer firms in the same industry and size group) generate superior future returns and better...

Traditional finance theory suggests that riskier investments should yield higher returns. Challenging this notion, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that highly-incented managers may take on excessive risk, leading to greater losses, while other theoretical research argues that high...

We address whether mutual funds act effectively as monitors through the proxy voting process by supporting wealth increasing items. We examine 213,579 voting decisions made by 1,799 mutual funds from 94 fund families for 1,047 shareholder proposals voted on between July 2003 and June 2005. In...

We document that CEO cash compensation is twice as sensitive to negative stock returns as it is to positive stock returns. Since stock returns include both unrealized gains and unrealized losses, we expect cash compensation to be less sensitive to stock returns when returns contain unrealized...

Stock prices are mechanically driven by changes in either expected cash flows or discount rates (expected returns). Fundamentally firm values move with managerial decisions. We explore through which channel managers commonly affect their firms' value. A variance decomposition analysis indicates...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

In this study, we investigate the effect of merger waves on the long-term valuation of aggregate stock market. Our empirical test shows significant positive relationship between the intensity of past, with four years lag, aggregate merger activity and the valuation of aggregate stock market

The study introduces empirical evidence that there are statistically significant relationships between intensity of upcoming aggregate merger activity and the present values of the factors HML and SMB in the Fama-French three-factor model of assets pricing