Non-financial performance measures, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) measures, are potentially leading indicators of firms' financial performance. I draw on the prior academic literature and the concept of ESG materiality to develop new corporate governance and ESG...

Closed-end country funds are interesting in that they have two sets of prices for the same underlying assets – the net asset value (NAV) of the fund holdings as measured using the underlying firms' stock prices in their home markets and the fund price at which the fund trades on a U.S. stock...

After the financial crisis, there has been considerable debate about the role of corporations in society. It has become broadly accepted that corporations - particularly the world's largest publicly traded corporations – need to be governed with respect for the society and the environment....

We conduct a large-scale global study of ESG-linked pay for major firms that make up 85% of the market capitalization across 59 countries. We find that the pay adoption is higher for firms in extractive and utility industries, in countries that value individualism and femininity, have stronger...

Does the structure of corporate boards affect bondholder agency risk? Using mandatory board reforms, I show that firms that transition to independent boards experience economically significant reductions in payout, financing, and event risk covenants in their bond contracts. This effect is not...

In this paper we discuss the continued transition of financial markets towards trade standardization and the clearing of transactions, outlining the role of central clearing counterparties CCPs in reducing systemic and idiosyncratic risk. We contrast this with a discussion on bespoke non-cleared...

We examine the relation between international institutional ownership and payout policy using a comprehensive data set of equity holdings from 37 countries over the years 2000-2007. We find that foreign institutional ownership is negatively associated with the likelihood that a firm pays...

Although a growing number of investors are engaging with sovereign entities on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, little academic research investigates this new form of investor activism. Applying universal ownership theory and drawing on eleven case studies of policy...

We analyze a unique source of media data to assess the influence of different topics of corporate news on costs of financing for a sample of large European and US firms from 2006 to 2016. We distinguish between volume (number of news), tonality (positive, neutral, negative), source (financial...

We investigate whether the separation between ownership and control rights can be costly to controlling shareholders and firms in terms of capital-raising costs. Using estimates of the cost of equity capital implied by analyst earnings forecasts and growth rate for a sample of 1,207 firms from...