When private firms are acquired, buyers commonly rely on seller financing and earnouts. Using a novel database of private acquisitions, I find that seller financing and earnouts become more common as information asymmetry increases between the acquirer and the target. Financial statement audits...

When private firms are acquired, buyers commonly rely on seller financing and earnouts. Using a novel database of private acquisitions, I find that seller financing and earnouts become more common as information asymmetry increases between the acquirer and the target. Financial statement audits...

To understand the disruption and implications of distributed ledger technologies for financial reporting and auditing, we analyze firm misreporting, auditor monitoring and competition, and regulatory policy in a unified model. A federated blockchain for financial reporting and auditing can...

I examine whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US is a learning organization (i.e., one that is capable of learning and adaptation to the dynamic nature of the securities markets – the subject of the SEC's regulatory oversight). Using the treatment of public corporate...

We examine the effects of organization capital — evident in management quality practices — on firms' implied cost of equity. We show that superior management practices decrease firms' cost of equity capital. This novel finding, robust to a battery of sensitivity analyses and to endogeneity...

Using a cross-country sample of mergers and acquisitions, we examine the role of cultural, institutional, geographic and managerial factors on post-merger default risk. Our results are consistent with the asymmetric hypothesis that managers take advantage of the overvaluation and volatility of...

To test whether acquisitions by environmentally high performing firms are associated with superior cumulative abnormal returns (CAR), this study computes industry-adjusted eco-efficiency scores at the firm level, using carbon emission data from the Carbon Disclosure Project for a worldwide...

This paper is the first chapter of the third edition of The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach, by Reinier Kraakman, John Armour, Paul Davies, Luca Enriques, Henry Hansmann, Gerard Hertig, Klaus Hopt, Hideki Kanda Mariana Pargendler, Georg Ringe, and Edward Rock...

We study novel data on the universe of employment discrimination lawsuits filed in federal court against U.S. public corporations between 1992 and 2018. Shareholder value drops by $30 million, on average, in the three days surrounding a discrimination lawsuit filing. However, we find no evidence...