This paper examines how the distribution of target ownership is related with takeover premium in owner-manager dominant acquisitions, in which a firm is managed by managers and directors nominated and directed closely by controlling shareholders. We find that there exists the agency problem...

This study examines a new form of initial public offerings, “supercharged” IPOs, where a firm organized pre-IPO as a pass-through entity undergoes a series of transactions that steps-up the adjusted tax basis of the IPO firm's assets. This step-up imposes tax liabilities on pre-IPO owners...

Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive rights, while making cheap-stock tunneling more difficult, cannot prevent it when asymmetric information about the value of the offered shares makes it...

A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns....

We develop a model where a firm has an optimal exposure to cyber risk. With rational, fully informed agents and with no hysteresis, a successful cyberattack should have no impact on a financially unconstrained target's reputation and post-attack policies. In contrast, when a successful attack...

Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more “intangibles talk” complete more quickly. However, the value of these deals to...

We adopt a novel approach to explain why firms opt for or against CEO duality and the value implications of this choice. Exploiting the 2009 amendments to Regulation S-K, we provide unique evidence on the first-time disclosure of the reasons firms state for combining (separating) the roles of...

We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary and continuous outcomes. Variation in parameters can produce either positive or negative...

We critically revisit and expand previous studies on the likely valuation effect of Norway's pioneering board gender-quota law. Most important, Ahern and Dittmar (2012) report a significantly negative average abnormal stock return, which they conclude is evidence of a large shareholder-borne...

This study analyzes the effectiveness of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) in reducing possible profits from insider trading during voluntary tender offers with the purpose of delisting initiated by controlling shareholders. Exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the introduction...