The SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus is an external shock to all societies with lasting impacts that have changed individual, political, and corporate decisions profoundly. Increasing evidence reveals that an estimated 10-50% of those previously infected with COVID-19 face a longer-term or long-term...

We examine whether trust between the citizens in an acquirer’s country and those in a target’s country improves long-term synergistic gains in cross-border M&As. We find that acquirers’ announcement returns increase as trust increases. The result is robust to using a historical war as an...

This study examines whether gender diversity in firms’ upper echelons pays for investors by comparing the performance of gender-diverse portfolios in 19 international markets. First, using a portfolio approach, we compare the risk-adjusted performance and risk exposures of stock portfolios...

This paper explores how diversity among lead partner teams (LPTs) of private equity (PE) funds affects buyout performance. We argue that there is a trade-off between the “bright side” of diversity, i.e., improved decision-making due to a broader set of perspectives, and the “dark side”,...

What precisely is stock market short-termism? For an issue that pervades corporate governance thinking, rhetoric, and policymaking, one would think that we know well what it is. But much that’s called stock market short-termism is not properly categorized as such. This distinction—between...

We investigate the effect of CEO relative age, an early-life measure defined as age relative to others in the same school cohort determined by the cutoff date policy at primary school entry, on corporate risk-taking. We base our analysis on the arguable randomness of managers’ birth months and...

Academic research on loan loss provisioning and the earlier incurred credit losses (ICL) model has a long tradition in the literature. Academic criticism of the ICL was taken up by the Financial Stability Board after the financial crisis of 2018, leading to a fundamental revision of accounting...

We propose a proxy for global equity mispricing (mispricing $R^2$) based on an instrumented principal component analysis of the return variation of 198 mispricing anomalies. We find that mispricing $R^2$ is higher for countries with lower market development, lower accounting quality, and higher...

Numerous influential critics and corporate managers allege that activist investors demand changes that increase short-term stock prices at the expense of long-term shareholder value (“short-termism”). Research to-date focuses on hedge funds. We provide new evidence by using a larger sample...

We examine the relation between four dimensions of national culture and earnings quality of banks using a sample of banks from 39 countries. We conduct our analyses over two sample periods, one spanning the pre-financial crisis (i.e., the period 1993-2006) and the other spanning the financial...