We study the unique governance dynamics surrounding family ownership in a voluntary regulatory arena where we can directly observe the impact of firm ownership on corporate governance practices pertaining to the composition of the board of directors. We find that family firms are more likely to...

We use the length of employment contracts to estimate CEO turnover probability and its effects on risk-taking. Protection against dismissal should encourage CEOs to pursue riskier projects. Indeed, we show that firms with lower CEO turnover probability exhibit higher return volatility,...

This paper shows that during episodes of market turmoil 13F institutional investors with short trading horizons sell their stockholdings to a larger extent than 13F institutional investors with longer trading horizons. This creates price pressure for stocks mostly held by short horizon...

We study the feedback from hedging mortgage portfolios on the level and volatility of interest rates. We incorporate the supply shocks resulting from hedging into an otherwise standard dynamic term structure model, and derive two sets of predictions which are strongly supported by the data:...

In choosing transparency, firms must trade off the benefits from better access to finance against the cost of a greater tax burden. We study this trade-off in a model with distortionary taxes and endogenous rationing of external finance. The evidence from two different data sets, one formed only...

We study rights offerings using a sample of 8,238 rights offers announced during 1995-2008 in 69 countries. Although shareholders prefer having the option to trade rights, issuers deliberately restrict tradability in 38% of the offerings. We argue that firms restrict rights trading to avoid the...

We develop an equilibrium model of debt maturity choice of rms, in the presence of xed issuance costs in primary debt markets, and an over-the-counter secondary debt market with search frictions. Liquidity in this market is related to the ratio of buyers to sellers, which is determined in...

We propose a new estimator of multivariate ex-post volatility that is robust to microstructure noise and asynchronous data timing. The method is based on Fourier domain techniques, which have been widely used in discrete time series analysis. The advantage of this method is that it does not...

We explore a new mechanism through which investors take correlated shortcuts. Specifically, we exploit a regulatory provision governing firm classification into industries: A firm’s industry classification is determined by the segment that has the majority of sales. We find strong evidence...

This paper estimates the effects of Say-on-Pay (SoP); a policy that increases shareholder "voice" by providing shareholders with a regular vote on executive pay. We apply a regression discontinuity design to the votes on shareholder-sponsored SoP proposals. Adopting SoP leads to large increases...