Health-insurance premiums account for a significant portion of the cost base of U.S. corporations. A recent study finds that health-insurance premiums increase for firms that experience positive profit shocks (Dafny 2010), suggesting that the U.S. health-insurance market is not perfectly...

Firm lifecycle theory predicts that the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) will tend to fall over the lifecycle of the firm (Mueller, 2003, p. 80-81). However, given that previous research finds that corporate governance deteriorates as firms get older (Mueller and Yun, 1998; Saravia, 2014)...

This paper profiles what I believe are core value investing general principles. In my work as a corporate financial and strategic advisor, I have observed a need for such an exposition because core value investing theory is not well understood by many corporate executives. Two anecdotal examples...

Practitioners have long criticized risk-factor disclosures in the 10-K as generic and boilerplate. In response, regulators emphasize the importance of being specific. By using a computing algorithm, this paper establishes a new measure (Specificity) to quantify the level of specificity of firms'...

This research investigates the determinants of the capital structure of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) using a unique database that includes over 19,000 Brazilian firms and spans 13 years of data. The econometric analysis employs the System Generalized Method of Moments estimator (GMM-Sys)...

I examine the effect of information frictions across corporate hierarchies on internal capital allocation decisions using the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) as a quasi-natural experiment. I find that after SOX, the capital allocation decision in conglomerates is more sensitive to the performance...

CEOs whose observed personal option-holding patterns are not consistent with theoretical predictions are variously described as overconfident or optimistic. Existing literature demonstrates that the investment and financing decisions of such CEOs differ from those of CEOs who do not exhibit such...

A large and rapidly growing literature examines the impact of misvaluation on firm policies by using mutual fund outflow-induced price pressure to isolate non-fundamental price variation. I demonstrate that the standard approach to computing outflow-induced price pressure produces a measure that...

Divergent views exist about whether boards must tradeoff advising for monitoring performance when utilizing outside versus inside directors. We suggest a dichotomous tradeoff focus underestimates outside directors' impact on board performance. We find outside director tenure positively...