We study 6,686 IPOs spanning the period 1981-2005 and find that the new issues puzzle disappears in a Fama-French three-factor framework. IPOs do not underperform in the aftermarket on a risk-adjusted basis and do not underperform a matched sample of non-issuers. IPO underperformance is...

A primary concern in mergers and acquisitions is the risk the deal may be cancelled before it is completed. We document that this ``interim risk" varies asymmetrically with the aggregate market return. Deals paid in cash tend to be renegotiated when the market rises but cancelled when the market...

Skewness preference, the tendency to overweight the probability of extreme tail events, can affect managerial decision making. We find that Chinese listed firms managed by CEOs who experienced a largely unpredictable rare event, namely the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in...

This study, through empirical evidence of 3,081 US firms during the period of 1992-2009, shows a strong causal relation between different CEO compensation components and firms' investment policy and firm risk. Specifically, the proportion of CEO option-based compensation is positively and...

We use economic policy uncertainty (EPU) shocks in combination with the mixed data sampling (MIDAS) approach to investigate long-run stock market variances and correlations, primarily for the US and the UK. The US long-run stock market variance depends significantly on US EPU shocks but not on...

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...

We examine risk-return trade-offs associated with “covlite” deals which lack systematic covenant compliance requirements of traditional “covheavy” deals. We document demand-driven risk taking incentives in the primary markets where covlite deal pricing has become increasingly...

Shareholder litigation risk, measured using the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in 23 states from 1989 to 2005, has a negative effect on stock returns. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that, following the passage of the laws, firms have lower stock returns....

This paper studies the impact of corporate acquisitions - both domestic and cross-border - on the uncertainty faced by acquiring firms. We use data for UK publicly-listed firms from 2004 to 2017 and employ a matching estimator combined with difference-in-differences to control for the endogenous...

Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...