This paper examines the impact of staggered boards on the value of voting rights (i.e., voting premium) estimated using option prices. We find companies with staggered boards have higher voting premium. Exploiting plausibly exogenous court rulings, we confirm that weakening the effectiveness of...

Firms with higher (lower) vote values have significantly lower (higher) future returns. Constructing portfolios based on an option-based measure of the value of voting rights yields average return spreads of about 80 basis points per month, and the return differences persist up to ten months....

Contrary to the entrenchment view of executive compensation, I find that CEOs with more control over the firm, proxied by higher equity ownership, have smaller compensation packages and are less likely to have severance contracts. Despite lower pay, these CEOs have longer tenure and their...

We examine the influence of common ownership on commonalities in the information environment. Specifically, we study commonalities in financial statements and in the actions of key agents such as financial analysts and firm managers who contribute and respond to the information environment....

Using a sample of more than 1,500 US public firms in the period 1998-2016, we examine how firms endogenously adjust CEO compensation contracts when they become financially distressed. The link between compensation and equity-based measures of firm performance is positive and strong prior to...

This paper examines board composition and CEO turnover when a public company is taken private by a private equity group in an LBO, using a new data set of all public to private transactions in the UK between 1998 and 2003. We find that when a company goes private, the board size is reduced and...

This paper proposes a new approach of inferring the value of voting rights attached to a stock by using options. This method might help solve the problems present in previous studies on the value of control such as endogeneity and data availability. The paper also has implications for option...

This paper examines whether changes in the color-coded terror alert level set by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security affect U.S. capital markets. The alert level has changed 17 times (9 times raised and 8 times lowered) from the time the alert system was established on March 12, 2002 until...

The short-selling of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) creates “phantom” ETF shares, trading at ETF market prices, with cash flows rights but no associated voting rights. Unlike regular ETF shares backed by the underlying securities of the ETF and voted as directed by the sponsor, phantom ETF...

Short-selling and liquidity provision in Exchange-Traded Funds creates ETF shares with cash flows rights but no associated voting rights. These "phantom shares" trade at ETF market prices, but, because they are not backed by the underlying basket of securities held by the ETF sponsor's custodian...