This article reviews shareholder activism by hedge funds. We first describe the nature and characteristics of hedge fund activism, including the objectives, tactics, and choices of target companies. We then analyze possible value creation brought about by activist hedge funds, both for...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

In 2002, the Financial Accounting Standards Board allowed corporations to recognize stock options as an expense on their financial statements on a voluntary basis. Option expensing became mandatory in 2004. This investigation uses two different models to reexamine the effects of the announcement...

The simple happenstance of the overall stock market being up or down for the day can explain a substantial portion of the abnormal return attached to corporate news announcements. In particular, we demonstrate that firm-specific news announcements that are typically met with a positive stock...

This paper considers the association between regulatory management evaluations and bank accounting returns and risk. For robustness, we estimate our tests using a matched sample with equal numbers of banks with and without weak regulatory management evaluations. We document a strong association...

Income smoothing is defined as the deliberate normalization of income in order to reach a desired trend. If the smoothing causes more information to be reflected in the stock price, it is likely to improve the allocation of resources and can be a critical factor in investment decisions. This...

In contrast to previous studies documenting positive abnormal returns to target shareholders, we find that hedge fund activism significantly reduces existing bondholders' wealth. Bondholders earn an average excess bond return of -3.9% around the initial 13D filing date, and an additional average...

We study 6,686 IPOs spanning the period 1981-2005 and find that the new issues puzzle disappears in a Fama-French three-factor framework. IPOs do not underperform in the aftermarket on a risk-adjusted basis and do not underperform a matched sample of non-issuers. IPO underperformance is...

Taxation can be considered central to corporate finance theory, where it contributes to the determination of capital structure, dividend policy and valuation of the firm. However, it plays little role in the developments of market finance theory, financial investment analysis or asset and...

The method of distributing excess cash among investors is determined by dividend policies taken by each company. Usually, there are three alternatives of the excess cash distribution; offering special dividend, initiating or increasing regular dividend and repurchase share. Special dividend that...