This paper investigates the dynamic relation between market-wide trading activity and returns in 46 markets. Many stock markets exhibit a strong positive relation between turnover and past returns. These findings stand up in the face of various controls for volatility, alternative definitions...

As firms have more assets in place, more of management's limited attention is focused on managing assets in place rather than developing new growth options. Consequently, as firms grow older, they have fewer growth options and a lower ability to generate new growth options. This simple theory...

This paper investigates how public equity issuance is related to stock market liquidity. Using quarterly data on IPOs and SEOs in 36 countries over the period 1995-2008, we show that equity issuance is significantly and positively related to contemporaneous and lagged innovations in aggregate...

We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared to U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results...

This paper investigates how a foreign firm’s decision to cross-list its shares in the U.S. is related to the concentration of the ownership of its cash flow rights and of its control rights. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to...

While there is widespread concern that target CEO retention by the acquirer harms target shareholders when the acquirer is a private equity firm, CEO retention can also be valuable to private equity acquirers, and hence potentially benefit shareholders. We find that CEO retention does not harm...

Liquidity production is a central role of banks. When there is a market premium for the production of (socially valuable) liquid financial claims and no other departures from the Modigliani and Miller (1958, MM) assumptions, we show that high leverage is optimal for banks. In this model, high...

Defining normal cash holdings as the holdings a firm with the same characteristics would have had in the late 1990s, we find that the average abnormal cash holdings of U.S. firms after the financial crisis amount to 10% of cash holdings, which represents an 87% increase in abnormal cash holdings...

Although firm financial policies were affected by a credit contraction during the recent financial crisis, the impact of increased uncertainty and decreased growth opportunities was stronger than that of the credit contraction per se. From the start of the financial crisis (third quarter of...

During the past two decades, the fraction of the world's initial public offerings (IPOs) accounted for by U.S. firms has fallen sharply. This decrease is attributed to higher IPO activity outside the U.S. and lower IPO activity in the U.S. We show that financial globalization has played a major...