Political insider trading has brought substantial attention to ethical considerations in the academic literature. While the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act prohibits members of Congress and their staff from leveraging non-public information to make investment decisions,...

This paper examines price reactions to analysts' recommendations issued in the opposite direction of recent stock price movements. We find that upgrade and downgrade contrarian recommendations induce larger market reactions than non-contrarian recommendations, consistent with the view that they...

We open the black box of the M&A decision process by constructing a comprehensive sample of US firms with specialized M&A staff. We investigate whether specialized M&A staff improves acquisition performance or facilitates managerial empire building instead. We find that firms with specialized...