We test the hypothesis that US corporations headquartered in states with greater public corruption are also prone to more unethical behavior when operating abroad. We exploit passage of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) that curtailed bribery of foreign officials and find firms in corrupt...

We model an IPO company's optimal response to the presence of sentiment investors and short sale constraints. Given regulatory constraints on price discrimination, the optimal mechanism involves the issuer allocating stock to 'regular' institutional investors for subsequent resale to sentiment...

Our model of the initial public offering process links the three main empirical IPO anomalies underpricing, hot issue markets, and long-run underperformance and traces them to a common source of inefficiency. We relate hot IPO markets (such as the 1999/2000 market for Internet IPOs) to the...

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...

Are overconfident executives more likely to be promoted to CEOs? Using an option-based overconfidence measure, we show that firms with overconfident executives tend to hire internally. Further, when firms hire internally, they are more likely to pick a more confident candidate. The results...

Motivated by ongoing debates on investment-cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) and its documented decline and disappearance in the U.S., we investigate the determinants of ICFS. Using firm-level data across 41 countries for the 1993–2013 period, we document an important role of asset tangibility in...

Overconfident CEOs tend to have over-positive views of their own skills and of future corporate performance. Thus, we hypothesize that overconfident executives are more likely to engage in reckless or intentional actions that give rise to SCAs. We find that executive-overconfidence increases...

We examine underwriting fees for repeat issuers of new securities to determine the relation between loyalty to an underwriting bank and the fees charged. For a sample of offers over the 1975-2001 period, we find that loyalty is associated with lower fees for common stock offers, consistent with...

We examine underwriting fees for repeat issuers of new securities to determine the relation between loyalty to an underwriting bank and the fees charged. For a sample of offers over the 1975-2001 period, we find that loyalty is associated with lower fees for common stock offers, consistent with...