This paper investigates an unintended consequence of equity-based compensation plans: in highly volatile firms, managers appear to undermine the compensation system's intended effect of aligning managers' interests with those of shareholders. Specifically, many managers are selling at least a...

Motivated by failures of iconic corporate hallmarks like Enron and WorldCom, in July of 2002 the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed to prevent managerial misconduct and deceptive accounting in an effort to ensure incentives alignment between managers and shareholders. Whether the Act has been...

Do certain regions inherently enjoy an advantage in venture capital investment decisions? And how do industry characteristics affect venture capital activity? These questions fall under the reemerging study of economic geography, which suggests the importance of industrial location to economic...

The incredible profits of Initial Public Offerings have often been emphasized in the media as a popular investment for the public. This paper takes a few steps towards refuting such an assertion by investigating the performance of 2,895 venture capital backed IPOs between 1968 and September...

We investigate whether risk seeking or non-concave utility functions can help to explain the cross-sectional pattern of stock returns. For this purpose, we analyze the stochastic dominance efficiency classification of the value-weighted market portfolio relative to benchmark portfolios based on...

China’s STAR market (Shanghai Stock Exchange Science and Technology Innovation Board) is its newest stock market, which was officially launched in June 2019, and whose index was released in July 2020. It has attracted extensive attention from market players, but almost no coverage from...

While macro-corporate-governance (e.g., addressing how a governance process should be administered within a corporate structure) seems to be widely discussed in academic literature, a discussion of micro-corporate-governance (e.g., assessing specific models, including regarding whether they...

Stock pledged loans have become prevalent among large shareholders of listed firms in China. The largest shareholder pledges a greater fraction of her holdings as collateral for credit when the firm is in growth industries, less profitable, not state owned, and has higher leverage. Stock...

We study whether mutual fund managers' voting behavior is affected by their political affinity with the portfolio firms' CEOs. We document that common political affinity induces the fund manager to come to the CEO's help when such help is required – i.e., especially during contentious proxy...

This paper investigates the impact of debt covenant protection on the cross section of equity returns with a firm-level covenant index and four sub-indices. We find that firms with weaker covenant protection (lower covenant index levels) earn significantly higher risk-adjusted equity returns...