Significant increases in the level of target leverage have been previously documented, following unsuccessful takeover attempts. This increased leverage may signal managerial commitment to improved performance, suggesting that corporate performance and leverage should be positively related. If,...

I study managers' risk-taking behavior and how it is affected by equity-based compensation. I find that in response to an exogenous increase in takeover protection in Delaware during the mid-1990s, managers lower firm risk by 5%. I also find that the decrease in firm risk is concentrated among...

Utilizing a large sample with unique data gathered directly from private placement contracts, we address two important questions that remain unresolved in the literature. First, what types of relationships connect private placement investors and issuers, and how do these relationships affect...

I analyze the role of executive compensation in corporate governance. As proxies for corporate governance, I use board size, board independence, CEO-chair duality, institutional ownership concentration, CEO tenure, and an index of shareholder rights. The results from a broad cross-section of...

Eleven percent of the largest public U.S. firms are headed by the CEO who founded the firm. Founder-CEO firms differ systematically from successor-CEO firms. Founder-CEO firms invest more in R&D, have higher capital expenditures, and make more focused mergers and acquisitions. They have a higher...

This paper discusses how economists' views of firms' financial structure decisions have evolved, from treating firms' profitability as given, to acknowledging that managerial actions affect profitability, to recognizing that firm value depends on the allocation of decision or control rights. The...

Large Japanese banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (which we call zombies). We examine the implications of suppressing the normal competitive process whereby the zombies would shed workers and lose market share. The congestion...

We propose a method of estimating the Pareto tail thickness parameter of the unconditional distribution of a financial time series by exploiting the implications of a GJR-GARCH volatility model. The method is based on some recent work on the extremes of GARCH-type processes and extends the...