This paper discusses the recent phenomenon of activist investors in UK quoted companies in the context of recent developments in UK corporate governance. We present three case studies of recent activist investor intervention and discuss the implications for corporate governance regulation, that...

The benefits and costs of directors holding multiple board seats continue to be debated in the literature. We contribute to the debate by examining whether holding multiple outside board seats compromises directors' ability to effectively perform their monitoring duties. Analyzing over 40,000...

We develop a new method based on option pricing approach to examine wealth effects of creditors in mergers, because the present method which highly dependent on the bond price information is infeasible in undeveloped market like China. With the sample of 251 of Chinese listed companies during...

We evidence that Canadian seasoned equity issuers post a significant pre-issue stock price run-up and a significant post-issue underperformance, even when controlling for an investment risk factor, as in Lyandres, Sun and Zhang (2008). Our results do not corroborate the investment/risk...

We hypothesize that the root cause of many goodwill write-offs - managers' public admission of ill-advised corporate acquisitions - is the overpriced shares of buyers at acquisition. Overpriced shares provide managers with strong incentives to invest, and particularly to acquire businesses, even...

This paper shows that the presence of large public pension fund shareholders particularly reduces ex ante bad acquisitions. When firms with large public pension fund presence do acquire other firms, they perform relatively better in the long-run. Other institutional investors have either the...

We examine the monitoring benefits of institutional ownership on seasoned equity offerings (SEO) from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We first provide a model in which institutional investors monitor managers, mitigate agency costs, and influence corporate decisions on the SEO...

Prior studies document that firms using a Big 4 auditor have a lower cost of capital than other firms. We extend this literature by examining whether using an industry specialist auditor reduces cost of capital for clients of Big 4 audit firms. We document that firms that use Big 4 auditors that...

The relationship between CEO pay and performance has been much analyzed in the management and economics literature. This study analyzes the structure of executive compensation in family and non-family firms. In line with predictions of agency theory, it is found that the share of base salary is...

A rarely studied trend in corporate governance is the increasing tendency to fill CEO openings through external hires rather than through internal promotions: Kevin J. Murphy and Jaacute;n Zaacute;bojniacute;k (2004) show that the proportion of outside hires has doubled and their pay premium almost...