Using mergers and acquisitions as a testing ground we examine whether managers face conflicting incentives in selecting the uniqueness of their corporate strategy. We argue that firms that pursue strategies which assemble commonly-bundled assets may pay more for these assets, perhaps as a...

I study the capital structure of non-financial firms that own a financial subsidiary. In a panel of U.S. non-financial firms over 1984-2007 I find that a significant part of the overall Compustat non-financial universe maintains a financial subsidiary. Such non-financial firms have higher...

In this paper we argue that managers confront a paradox in selecting strategy. On the one hand, capital markets systematically discount uniqueness in the investment strategy choices of firms. Uniqueness in strategy heightens the cost of collecting and analyzing information to evaluate a firm's...

The accepted wisdom — that a lawyer who becomes a corporate director has a fool for a client — is outdated. The benefits of lawyer-directors in today's world significantly outweigh the costs. Beyond monitoring, they help manage litigation and regulation, as well as structure compensation to...

We propose that stronger creditor rights in bankruptcy reduce corporate risk-taking. Employing country-level data, we find that strong creditor rights are associated with a greater propensity of firms to engage in diversifying mergers, and this propensity changes in response to changes in the...

We examine the dynamic relation between return and volume of individual stocks in Russia and other emerging markets. In a simple model in which investors trade to share risk or speculate on private information, Llorente, Michaely, Saar, and Wang (2001) show that returns generated by risk-sharing...

We examine the performance of acquirers who hire an advisor that employs a “star” analyst covering the target (i.e., “star-crossed” deals) and show that such deals have lower abnormal announcement returns (2.1%), lower total acquisition returns (8.9%), and greater subsequent goodwill...

We document the emergence of the lead independent director (LID) board role in a sample of U.S. firms in 1999-2015. We find that firms that adopt a LID board role are larger and have more independent boards, higher institutional investor holdings, and an NYSE listing. Firms with greater...

We test whether fund managers have stock-picking skill by comparing their holdings and trades prior to earnings announcements with the returns realized at those events. This approach largely avoids the joint-hypothesis problem with long-horizon studies of fund performance. Consistent with...