We provide evidence on operating performance changes at a sample of U.S. banks acquired by non-U.S. banking organizations over the 1980-2001 period. Our sample allows us to compare directly the pre-acquisition performance of the targets with their post acquisition performance, a comparison that...

In this study we examine the relation between corporate governance and institutional ownership. Our empirical results show that the fraction of a company's shares that are held by institutional investors increases with the quality of its governance structure. In a similar vein, we show that the...

In this paper we present an extended model for the estimation of effective bid-ask spread that improves the existing models and offers a new direction of generalisation. The quoted bid-ask spread represents the prices available at a given time for transactions only up to some relatively small...

This paper studies an infinite horizon adverse selection model with an underlying two-state Markov decision process. It introduces a novel approach that constructs the continuation payoff frontier exactly, as the fixed point of a functional operator. If the model supports an incentive compatible...

This paper presents a novel framework for studying partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with finite state, action, observation sets and discounted rewards. The new framework is solely based on future-reward vectors associated with future policies, which is more parsimonious...

This work explores the potential of revenue sharing contracts to facilitate information sharing in a supply chain and mitigate the negative effects of information leakage. We consider a supplier who offers a revenue sharing contract to two competing retailers, one of whom has private information...

This paper investigates the performance of carry trade strategies for currencies with non-deliverable forward (NDF) contracts. We find that carry trades for currencies with NDF contracts are associated with higher Sharpe ratios compared to carry trades for currencies with deliverable forward...

Francis (2011) calls for more research on “the effect of audit quality on economic outcomes.” We respond by examining whether high-quality auditors reduce stock price crash risk, an important consideration for stock investors. We argue that high-quality auditors reduce crash risk because of...

In this study we analyze how CEO risk incentives affect the efficiency of research and development (R&D) investments. We examine a sample of 843 cases where firms increase their R&D investments by an economically significant amount over the period from 1995 to 2006. We find that firms with...

Using a sample of listed Chinese non-state-controlled enterprises (NSCEs) from 1999 to 2011, we show that NSCEs with political connections are less likely to engage high quality (big) auditors than similar non-connected NSCEs. These results suggest that connected NSCEs under Chinese state...