Current attempts to reform financial markets presume that shareholder empowerment benefits shareholders. We investigate the wealth effects associated with the SEC's rule to facilitate director nominations by shareholders. Our results are not in line with shareholder empowerment creating value:...

The effectiveness of any sanction depends on the costs of avoiding its restrictions. We examine whether bearish option strategies were substitutes for short sales during the September 2008 short-sale ban. We find a significant diminution in option volumes and a significant increase in option...

While convertible offerings announced between 1984 and 1999 induce average abnormal stock returns of −1.69%, convertible announcement effects over the period 2000 to 2008 are more than twice as negative (−4.59%). We hypothesize that this evolution is attributable to a shift in the...

Cash settlements became a popular design feature in convertible securities once they obtained favorable accounting treatment for diluted earnings per share in 2002. The unexpected proliferation of cash settlements provoked the FASB to eliminate their favorable accounting treatment in 2008. We...

By buying convertibles and shorting the underlying stock, hedge funds distribute equity exposure to well-diversified shareholders. We find that a higher fraction of a convertible is privately-placed with hedge funds when institutional ownership, stock liquidity, issue size, concurrent stock...

Companies planning a private placement typically gauge the interest of institutional buyers before the offering is publicly announced. Regulators are concerned with this practice, called wall-crossing, as it might invite insider trading, especially when the potential investors are hedge funds....

Employees of liquidating firms are likely to lose income and non-pecuniary benefits of working for the firm, which makes bankruptcy costly for employees. This paper examines whether firms take these costs into account when deciding on the optimal amount of leverage. We find that firms with...

Dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs) with discount offer shareholders the choice between receiving cash dividends or additional shares at a discount. We provide evidence on DRIP arbitrage where DRIP arbitrageurs extract the DRIP discount through short-term equity borrowing. We show the relation...