This paper analyzes stealth trading by corporate insiders in US equity markets. Stealth trading is the practice to break up trades into sequences of smaller trades. We find that stealth trading is pervasive and distinguish two explanations. The first argues that insiders break up trades in order...

We analyze the role of bankers on the boards of German non-financial companies for the period from 1994 to 2005. We find that banks that are represented on a firm's board promote their own business as lenders and as Mamp;A advisors. They also seem to act as financial experts who help firms to...

Do behavioral biases of executives matter for corporate investment decisions? Using segment-level capital allocation in multi-segment firms ("conglomerates") as a laboratory, we show that capital expenditure is increasing in the expected skewness of segment returns. Conglomerates invest more in...

From 1987 to 2008, riskier firms were more likely to be taken over. Yet, on average, the acquirer declined in value by 2.8% when it bought a "risky target" (the third tercile, having an annualized idiosyncratic volatility of 61% or more), but only by 0.6% when it bought a "safe target" (the...

Do employees who compare themselves to the CEO matter for executive compensation? We hypothesize that employees have relative wealth concerns and compare their wage to the CEO's pay. Using German establishment-level wage data, we indeed show that employee wages are increasing in CEO...

We investigate the impact of government-provided child care on women's careers. Using a unique employer-employee matched data set from Germany, we find that mothers in low child care counties experience a 25% larger earnings penalty than mothers in high child care counties. This penalty is...

Decisions are influenced by the environment in which the choices are presented. In fact, no choice is made in a vacuum, as there is no neutral way to present choices. Presenting choices in certain ways, even unintentionally, can “nudge” people to change their behavior in predictable ways....

In the period 1997-2004, Preussag, a diversified German conglomerate of old economy businesses, changed itself into TUI, a company focused almost entirely on tourism and logistics. This paper analyzes how this strategy was executed and how it contributed to Preussag's underperformance of the...

We study the restructuring of the labor force after mergers and acquisitions. Overall restructuring is large. Net employment of targets declines by more than half within two years after acquisitions relative to a matched sample, and is concentrated in targets that close all establishments. There...