This paper provides new evidence on the role of distance between banks and borrowers in bank lending. We argue that delegated monitors face higher costs of collecting information about nonlocal borrowers due to the difficulty of obtaining and verifying soft information over distances. Further,...

We examine dispersion in director characteristics within a board. Directors with different skills can augment the board's overall expertise and decision making flexibility, but they also face coordination problems. Empirically, the negative effect of dispersion on value prevails. To establish...

Weak creditor rights introduce contracting frictions and magnify conflicts of interest between borrowers and creditors. We examine the effects of creditor rights on the sensitivity of bank lending terms to aggregate relative to firm-specific information. We formulate two competing hypotheses. On...

This paper examines strategic interactions between venture capitalists (VCs) and top underwriters in the IPO process. We test two contrasting hypotheses: certification and rent extraction. On the one hand, the joint involvement of VCs and top underwriters can amplify their certification effect,...

This paper examines the impact of investor heterogeneity on trading. Institutional investors play a crucial role in the information environment of firms. We argue that heterogeneity in the information ability of institutional investors has a significant impact on trading around information...

In this paper we present new evidence on the relation between geographic diversification and firm risk using granular data on corporate locations. After accounting for determinants of geographic diversification, we find that geographically complex firms exhibit significantly higher risk than...

Empirical evidence on the relations between board independence and board decisions and firm performance is generally confounded by serious endogeneity issues. We circumvent these endogeneity problems by demonstrating the strong impact of the local director labor market on board composition....

In spite of considerable research into firm dividend behavior, dividend smoothing has eluded a definitive explanation. This paper provides an agency interpretation of dividend smoothing and offers evidence that variation in corporate governance and managerial incentive conflicts explains...

We examine how firms structure payout and debt commitments to address governance weaknesses. Firms with severe agency conflicts precommit through a combination of dividends and debt or through dividends rather than debt alone. Such firms also shift their shareholder payouts towards regular...