We review the theory and statistical evidence concerning the causes and effects of seasoned public offerings of common stock. We focus in particular on results and findings that post-date the well known survey by Smith (1986). In fact, recent studies now provide at least partial answers to...

I review recent empirical research documenting offer premiums and bidding strategies in corporate takeovers. The discussion ranges from optimal auction bidding to the choice of deal payment form and premium effects of poison pills. The evidence describes the takeover process at a detailed level,...

This essay surveys the extant literature and adds to the empirical evidence on issuance activity,flotation costs, and valuation effects of security offerings. We focus primarily on public offerings of equity for cash, although we also review and present new evidence on debt offerings and private...

The 'new issues puzzle' is that stocks of common stock issuers subsequently underperform nonissuers matched on size and book-to-market ratio. With 7000 seasoned equity and debt issues, we document that issuer underperformance reflects lower systematic risk exposure for issuing firms relative to...

We estimate sequentially outcome-probabilities and expected payoffs associated with first-, second- and final bids in a large sample of tender offer contests. Rival bids arrive quickly and produce large bid-jumps. Greater bidder toeholds (pre-bid ownership of target shares) reduce the...

While the U.S. has pursued a vigorous antitrust policy towards horizontal mergers over the past four decades, mergers in Canada have until recently been permitted to take place in a virtually unrestricted antitrust environment. The absence of an antitrust overhang in Canada presents an...

In a model of takeovers under asymmetric information, we identify a separating equilibrium in which the value of the bidder firm is revealed by the mix of cash and securities used as payment for the target. The model predicts that the revealed bidder value is monotonically increasing and convex...

Greenmail payments are widely viewed as managerial actions designed to perpetuate their tenure in office. This view, which suggests that greenmail prohibitions would enhance shareholder wealth, receives mixed empirical support in this paper. The average market reaction to charter amendments...

Event studies often include cross-sectional regressions of announcement effects on exogenous variables. If the event is voluntary and investors are rational, then standard OLS and GLS estimators are inconsistent. Consistent ML estimators are constructed for a cross-sectional model of horizontal...

While the classical dividend irrelevance theory implies that shareholders unanimously support the firm's dividend policy, managerial benefits from free cash flow, heterogenous personal tax rates and information asymmetries give rise to internal shareholder conflicts over the dividend decision....