Using novel data from executive deferred compensation, this paper presents new evidence on the relationship between CEO risk preference and firm risk (the volatility of firm performance measures such as stock return, earnings and operating cash flows). My results show a negative association...

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 study examines the informational content of options trading on acquirer announcement returns. We show that implied volatility spread predicts positively on the cumulative abnormal return (CAR), and implied volatility skew predicts negatively on the CAR. The predictability is much stronger...

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,...

We present a simple discrete-time version of the continuous-time agency model under mean-volatility joint ambiguity uncertainties, which conveniently captures a number of important properties of optimal contracts without having to rely on complex continuous-time mathematical issues. The...

Employee stock options (ESOs) are American-style call options that can be terminated early due to employment shock. This paper studies an ESO valuation framework that accounts for job termination risk and jumps in the company stock price. Under general Levy stock price dynamics, we show that a...