We examine the wealth effects of the SEC's recent proxy access rule to facilitate director nominations by shareholders. We focus on how a firm's governance characteristics affect the market reaction to the rule. We find more negative announcement effects for firms with high probabilities of...

Political risk relates to both the ability and the willingness of governments to repay debts. We find that bond prices only slowly adapt to changes in political risk. The expected bond returns for countries whose political risk ratings have improved are higher than those for countries whose...

Employees of liquidating firms are likely to lose income and non-pecuniary benefits of working for the firm, which makes bankruptcy costly for employees. This paper examines whether firms take these costs into account when deciding on the optimal amount of leverage. We find that firms with...

Non-standard errors capture uncertainty due to variation in research design choices. We study the importance of differential design choices in constructing asset pricing factors. By purposely data mining over 250 different versions of each factor, we find that Sharpe ratios exhibit substantial...

Directors are not one-dimensional. We characterize their skill sets by exploiting Regulation S-K's 2009 requirement that U.S. firms must disclose the experience, qualifications, attributes or skills that led the nominating committee to choose an individual as a director. We then examine how...

How synchronized are short sellers? We examine a unique dataset on the distribution of pro fits across a stock's short sellers and find evidence of substantial dispersion in the initiation of their positions. Consistent with this dispersion reflecting "synchronization risk," i.e., uncertainty...

We show that short sellers are constrained by their losses. Using unique data on the mark-to-market profits of short sellers of U.S. stocks, we document an asymmetric response of short selling to gains versus losses. Short selling substantially falls following large losses but does not respond...

In the secondary art market, artists play no active role. This allows us to isolate cultural influences on the demand for female artists' work from supply-side factors. Using 1.5 million auction transactions in 45 countries, we document a 47.6% gender discount in auction prices for paintings....

Seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) in the UK provide valuable choices to the issuer in terms of renounceability and control dilution. This is especially the case following the removal of the size restriction of pound;15 m on share placements to institutional investors in January 1996. We formulate...

Dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs) with discount offer shareholders the choice between receiving cash dividends or additional shares at a discount. We provide evidence on DRIP arbitrage where DRIP arbitrageurs extract the DRIP discount through short-term equity borrowing. We show the relation...