This paper is concerned with the ability of marketing investments to convey information from the “black box” of the firm to participants in the financial markets. We focus on the context of sales force resizing announcements in the pharmaceutical industry because the sales force comprises...

We argue that the documented discount on firms with staggered boards is not evidence that staggered boards destroy firm value. Instead, firms that are already discounted relative to industry peers choose to adopt a staggered board. We find that when the macroeconomic environment is weak, deeply...

Theory and recent empirical literature suggest that social and professional connections may influence corporate policy. However, inference may be biased by the possibility that firms who share peers also share unobserved characteristics that are correlated with observed policy. Using a novel...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and recently modified exchange listing requirements impose uniformly high levels of outside director monitoring on all firms. However, recent research in finance suggests that corporate governance structures, including boards of directors, are chosen endogenously...

We present evidence that, following the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, firms responded to the increased requirement for outside director monitoring by substituting insiders with outside directors who have social or professional connections to their CEOs. This substitution was most...