This paper asks the question whether dissent votes in uncontested director elections have consequences for directors. We show that, contrary to popular belief based on prior studies, shareholder votes have power and result in negative consequences for directors. Directors facing dissent are more...

This paper compares the raising of external equity capital from private equity investors via private investments in public equity (PIPEs) and seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) using a sample of 456 PIPEs and 1,910 SEOs drawn from nine Asian countries. Consistent with the idea that insiders...

We present the first estimates of investment returns and distribution rates for U.S. non-profit endowment funds, based on a comprehensive sample of 35,262 organizations drawn from Internal Revenue Service filings for 2009-2018, a period that saw a sharp drop followed by a lengthy appreciation in...

Do banks worry about expropriation when an activist hedge fund targets their borrowers or are they reassured that their borrowers will perform better after such targeting? We study 1,435 events during the 1996-2013 period in which an activist targeted a US corporation, to examine what happens to...

We show that executive ownership is a significant driver of the demand for credit following credit expansion policies. Our focus on credit demand is in contrast to most studies that have focused on credit supply factors such as bank-capital. Our identification exploits the large and unexpected...

We study a model in which leverage and compensation are both choice variables for the firm and borrowing spreads are endogenous. First, we analyze the correlation between leverage and variable compensation. We show that allowing for both endogenous compensation and leverage fully rationalizes...

For a foreign "issuer," the benefits of cross-listing in the United States are extensively documented in the literature. However it is not clear what motivates "investors" to hold American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock of these issuers. The authors address the...

Why do some firms raise equity capital from a small number of "private” investors (e.g. Private Investment in Public Equities–PIPE), while other firms do so from a large number of small investors (e.g. Seasoned Equity Offering–SEO)? Recent studies list market timing, asymmetric...

How capital structure, dividend policy and corporate governance vary across countries has been the focus of recent studies, but how resources are reallocated in response to poor performance has not received as much attention. This paper argues that the market for corporate control and the formal...