Abstract: Using a unique sample of 425 bank mergers in the US announced between 2000 and 2008 this paper provides clear evidence supporting the collusion and productive efficiency hypotheses. By analyzing 425 bank mergers and a total of 1112 possible rivals, our analysis shows that the majority...

We analyze the impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on the shareholder wealth gains using a sample of 640 completed U.S. M&As announced between 1990 and 2014. Our results indicate a positive DFA effect on announcement period abnormal returns in small bank mergers. In fact, mergers with combined firm...

We extend the U.S. bank M&As literature by examining bidder announcement abnormal returns in deals involving both public and private targets over a 32-years examination period. Our main findings document the existence of a listing effect in our sample. Banks gain when they acquire private firms...

This paper investigates the role of textual information in a U.S. bank merger prediction task. Our intuition behind this approach is that text could reduce bank opacity and allow us to understand better the strategic options of banking firms. We retrieve textual information from bank annual...

In this paper, we use the sentiment of annual reports to gauge the likelihood of a bank to participate in a merger transaction. We conduct our analysis on a sample of annual reports of listed U.S. banks over the period 1997 to 2015, using the Loughran and McDonald's lists of positive and...

We investigate corporate governance experts' claim that it is detrimental to a firm to reappoint former CEOs as directors after they step down as CEOs. We find that more successful and more powerful former CEOs are more likely to be reappointed to the board multiple times after they step down as...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on firm-level investment during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that firms with less conservative financial reporting experienced a sharper decline in investment activity following...

We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...