We examine the impact of CDS trading and the lifting of short sales restrictions on the profitability of reported insider trades within US financial firms. We find evidence that executive directors possess significant insider knowledge about their firm's risk prior to the initiation of CDS...

In this paper we examine the effect of financial analysts on the quality of corporate investment decisions. We show that greater analyst coverage leads to higher total factor productivity within firms, a finding that is robust after using both an instrumental variable approach and an...

This paper examines the impact of promotion-based tournament incentives on corporate acquisition performance. Measuring tournament incentives as the compensation ratio between the CEO and other senior executives, we show that acquirers with greater tournament incentives experience lower...

We examine the effect of shareholder litigation rights on managers' acquisition decisions. Our experimental design exploits a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on July 2, 1999 that resulted in a reduction in shareholder class actions. We find that, since the ruling, firms in Ninth...

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on CDS spreads of companies around the world. We find that the pandemic-induced increases in corporate CDS spreads are concentrated in firms with higher leverage, non-investment-grade rating, lower profitability, and higher stock volatility. Further...