Many believe that deliberative democracy, where individuals discuss alternatives before voting on them, should result in collectively superior outcomes because voters become better informed and decisions are justified using reason. These deliberations typically involve a moderator, however,...

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court...

We use a web-based asset market experiment to study whether ESG information affects the portfolio choices of retail investors. We find a significantly higher portfolio allocation to stocks with ESG information in the order of 11 percentage points compared to a control group where no ESG...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

One alternative presented in the literature to increase adhesion to pension plans is to modify the default of choices from opt in (to adhere to the plan) to opt out (leave the plan), a nudge typical of the libertarian paternalism (Kahneman, 2002). An experimental design was adopted, adapted from...

When bidders in a corporate takeover have related resources and post-acquisition strategies, their valuations of a target are likely to be interdependent. This paper analyzes sequential-entry takeover contests in which similar bidders have correlated private valuations. The level of similarity...

In 2009, the Seventh Circuit ruled in U.S. v. Apex Oil that certain types of injunctions requiring firms to clean up previously released toxic chemicals were not dischargeable in bankruptcy. This was widely perceived to represent a split with Sixth Circuit precedent, although Supreme Court cert...

When forming policy under conditions of extreme uncertainty, the optimal approach seems to be a process by which the policy decision is divided into multiple stages, or in other words, an experimental approach. The optimal legal vehicle for such policy experimentation is what I call...

The historic financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 seriously affected investors. In general, stock market values declined by about 50 percent but largely recovered from pre-crisis levels by the end of 2012 due in part to unprecedented stimulus efforts. Nonetheless, the cumulative return on stocks...

Mutual fund holdings data reveal a significant impact of mutual funds on the capital expenditures ("CapEx'') of their portfolio companies. Following the shock to mutual fund ownership caused by the 2003 scandal, during which 25 fund families experienced significant outflows of capital, firms...