We exploit variation in the cultural heritage across U.S. CEOs who are the children or grandchildren of immigrants to demonstrate that the cultural origins of CEOs matter for corporate outcomes. Following shocks to industry competition, firms led by CEOs who are second- or third-generation...

We explore the role of cultural heritage in explaining CEOs overconfidence and its impact on the propensity and performance of corporate acquisitions. CEOs are more prone to overconfidence if the culture in their ancestral country of origin is characterized by strong individualism, independence,...

We explore if sleep deprivation affects how investors react to relevant news. Using the transition to Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the spring as a disruption to sleeping patterns, we show that investors underreact to a firm’s earnings surprise in the days after the transition to DST. Further,...

We analyze the impact of incentive mechanisms embedded in executive remuneration contracts on the risk choices made by bank CEOs. For a panel of US and European banks, we employ the Merton distance to default model to estimate how bonus payments and option holdings impact the level of bank...

We analyze the takeover premiums paid for a sample of European bank mergers between 1997 and 2007. We find that acquiring banks value profitable, high-growth and low risk targets. We also find that the strength of bank regulation and supervision as well as deposit insurance regimes in Europe...

While there is some evidence on the impact of international M&As on bank risk profiles, there is a paucity of research on the impact of domestic M&As on bank risk. This paper exploits a rich database of Spanish banks during 1986-2010 to study the changes in bank risk profiles immediately before...

Widespread losses during the recent financial crisis have increased concerns that equity-based compensation for bank CEOs causes excessive risk-taking by banks. Debt-based compensation, so-called inside debt, aligns the interests of CEOs with those of external creditors. We examine whether...

This study seeks to understand how executive director heterogeneity affects the performance of US banks. To measure the expected performance effects linked to director heterogeneity, we compute changes in the market valuation of banks linked to announcements of executive director appointments....