Financial economists seem to believe that takeovers are partly motivated by the desire to improve poorly-performing firms. However, prior empirical evidence in support of this inefficient management hypothesis is rather weak. We provide a detailed reexamination of this hypothesis in a...

While the bulk of the research on the financial performance of mergers and acquisitions has focused on stock returns around the merger announcement, a surprisingly large set of papers has also examined long-run stock returns following acquisitions. We review this literature, concluding that...

This paper examines whether underwriter reputation, venture capitalist (VC) backing, and VC reputation are related to the probability that a newly public firm has serious accounting problems. We examine a sample of firms that went public during 1995-2005 and announced restatements within three...

This paper examines the use of seven mechanisms to control agency problems between managers and shareholders. These mechanisms are: shareholdings of insiders, institutions, and large blockholders; use of outside directors; debt policy; the managerial labor market; and the market for corporate...

This paper examines firms' choice of the mix of mechanisms used to reduce agency problems between managers and shareholders. We empirically address two questions. First, is there interdependence between the use of the various quot;control mechanismsquot;? Second, does cross-sectional evidence...