Using securities lawsuits related to M&A as an industry shock, we examine whether litigation risk acts as an external governance mechanism by disciplining managers' investment decisions. In the two years following an M&A lawsuit (a lawsuit where plaintiffs allege that the firm hid poor...

We study whether firms increase share repurchases when their shareholders have short-term preferences. We base our analysis on economic theory that establishes that greater transparency about an agent's action increases the agent's career concerns and short-termism. We use a...

We examine whether higher accounting comparability between public and private firms facilitates the valuation of private firms and, in particular, impacts the value relevance of private firms' financial reporting in M&A transactions. To help develop our hypotheses, we conduct a series of...

This paper investigates whether political connections affect individuals' propensity to engage in illegal activities in financial markets. We use the 2007 French presidential election as marker of change in the value of political connections, in a difference-in-differences research design. We...

We examine the capital market consequences of a regulatory intervention aimed at generalizing tenure voting in French public companies. The 2014 Florange Act departs from the ‘one share one vote' principle by automatically granting double voting rights (DVR) to shares held for at least two...

Using the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in the United States, we study the effect of shareholder litigation risk on corporate disclosure. We find that disclosure significantly increases after UD laws make it more difficult to file derivative lawsuits. Specifically, firms issue...