This paper argues that an external monitor can be less effective when there is uncertainty regarding the quality of the management and the business environment. In a two-period model, an outside monitor, who initially does not know managerial quality, can have the manager fired. The manager...

We find that IPOs issued in more competitive, and more highly leveraged, industries underperform in the three years following their issuance. Both results are economically large, and are robust to numerous controls. We conduct several tests to trace the economic sources of this underperformance....

We find evidence that the underperformance of some IPOs, and firms in concentrated industries, have common empirical roots. The most likely explanation for both is a confluence of two well known rational theories, which predict that: (1) entrepreneurs in concentrated industries optimally time...

This paper shows that the presence of large public pension fund shareholders particularly reduces ex ante bad acquisitions. When firms with large public pension fund presence do acquire other firms, they perform relatively better in the long-run. Other institutional investors have either the...

This paper compares investor sentiment measures based on consumer confidence surveys with measures extracted from the closed-end fund discount (CEFD). Our evidence suggests that these two kinds of sentiment measures do not correlate well with one another. For a short 2 - 4 year period in which...

This paper shows that firms engage in less M&A activity when they have large public pension fund (PPF) owners. For example, the presence of a 5% PPF blockholder reduces the frequency of acquisitions by about 7%. An extra 3% in ownership by the top PPF owner reduces the size of acquisition...

This paper shows that the presence of large public pension fund shareholders particularly reduces acquisitions by cash-rich and low-q firms, and by firms seeking to ``buy growth'', after controlling for ownership endogeneity, firm-level governance structure, and other firm characteristics. When...