Using microdata from France, we provide novel evidence that salience shapes banks’ lending decisions. Information about borrowers’ payment defaults on trade bills is publicly available to all banks, but it appears more prominently to the bank managing the payment transaction (i.e., the...

We provide evidence on how personal shocks that plausibly reduce a CEO's career horizon, triggered by either the CEO's diagnosis of a serious illness or an illness or death of a close relative, affect key corporate policies. We validate our identification strategy by showing that these events...

We examine the role of IPOs as a source of financing by comparing firms from countries with different degrees of stock market development. Focusing on acquisition investments, our results suggest that firms operating in economies with a more developed stock market extract more benefits from the...

This article studies European acquisitions in the period 1990-2013 to examine the relationship between family ownership and the propensity to undertake diversifying acquisitions. We show that family firms, especially those highly leveraged, tend to make more cross-industry acquisitions as this...

Firms provide compensation incentives to executives, primarily in the form of bonus payments, to alleviate slack in the deployment of corporate resources to working capital. Financially constrained firms are heavy users of working capital incentives. So are firms that are less exposed to...

This article adopts an agency perspective of the firm and reviews the mergers and acquisitions literature from the lens of corporate governance. We highlight how the different corporate governance mechanisms affect the takeover process and outcomes. The internal and external governance...