The current research assesses the risks commonly attributed to the presence of HFT in the context of different market structures deployed by the U.S. exchanges. In particular, we find that, by design, the so-called “normal” exchanges have the lowest market quality, including the highest...

During the recent financial crisis, there was a dramatic spike, across all industries, in the volatility of individual firm share prices after adjustment for movements in the market as a whole. In this Article, we demonstrate that a similar spike has occurred with each major downturn in the...

This study examines whether the term of the auditor-client relationship (i.e., auditor tenure) is associated with future stock price crash risk measured both ex ante and ex post. Using a large sample of U.S. public firms with Big Four auditors, we find robust evidence that auditor tenure is...

This paper empirically analyses the effect of foreign block acquisitions on the U.S. target firms' credit risk as captured by their CDS. The involvement of foreign investors leads to a significant increase in the target firms' CDS spreads. This effect is stronger when foreign owners are...

This paper investigates how the degree of managerial expropriation affects equity volatility of individual firms. We develop a corporate finance model with endogenous financing policies and manager-shareholder agency conflicts, and identify two countervailing forces. First, in response to...

This paper studies, both theoretically and empirically, the optimal executive compensation when firm performance is a noisy signal of executive’s hidden effort and the volatility of firm performance is stochastic. We build a tractable dynamic principal-agent model and show analytically that...

This study investigates the volatility spillovers between Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) and a set of alternative instruments comprising traditional IPOs, merger arbitrage, hedge replication funds and equities, utilizing a time-varying spillover approach. Our empirical findings,...

Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fashion and financial market...