We find that value stocks are riskier because they are usually firms under distress, have high financial leverages, and face substantial uncertainty in future earnings. These risk characteristics are as powerful as size and book-to-market in explaining cross sectional differences in returns in...

We provide evidence that managers and controlling shareholders time management buyouts (MBOs) and freezeout transactions to take advantage of industry-wide undervaluation. Portfolios of industry peers of MBO and freezeout targets show significant alphas of around 1% per month over the 12-month...

We propose that fitted values from market-wide regressions of firm returns on lagged firm characteristics provide useful benchmarks for assessing whether average returns to certain stocks are abnormal. To illustrate, we study eight events where abnormal returns have been documented, including...

We document the implications of an LBO for the target firm's peers in terms of follow-on acquisitions, alliances, investment, and governance changes. LBOs tend to lead overall merger activity, predicting both more LBOs and strategic acquisitions in the industry. LBOs predict significant changes...

Kolari, Pynnonen, and Tuncez rely on simulation outcomes to criticize the normalization of firm characteristics employed by Bessembinder and Zhang (2013) to assess returns after major corporate events. However, their simulation outcomes simply verify that a non‐linear normalization is...

This paper investigates whether systematic liquidity risk is priced by implementing an empirical test on the recently proposed float-adjusted return model. For testing purposes, we obtain an appropriate (and arguably unique) empirical measure of so-called liquidity beta based on Chinese...

We examine changes to the products of public target firms after LBO using a novel dataset of firm products. We find that private equity funds cut target firms' new products after LBO, especially when there is less room to improve the target firm's performance through financial engineering....

We show that distribution of stock dividends is costly to stockholders of levered firms. In addition, it is associated with reductions in future profits. Yet consistent with past studies, we document positive and significant announcement returns for the 1954-2017 period, perhaps responding to...

We investigate investor reactions to merger and acquisition rumors. Employing a large and comprehensive sample of acquisition rumors, we find that the rumor target firms experience average cumulative abnormal returns of 4.78% over the three days around the rumor, and abnormal returns of -4.48%...