The Dodd-Frank Act created differential regulatory requirements for banks above specified asset size thresholds. Event study results imply greater expected net regulatory costs for above-threshold banks. Consistent with hypotheses that near-below-threshold banks alter their behavior to attempt...

Many regulations that affect firms and banks in the economy are based on size thresholds. We develop a model that shows that such regulations distort risk-taking incentives, providing above-threshold firms with greater incentives to take risk and below-threshold firms the opposite. Risk...

Firm value and operating performance are positively related to managerial incentives from both vested and unvested stock and option holdings. The effects of incentives on firm value and operating performance are significantly larger for unvested stock and options than for vested ones, however,...

We build a competition network that links two industries through their common market leaders. Industries with higher centrality on the competition network have higher expected stock returns because of higher exposure to the cross-industry spillover of distress shocks. The competition intensity...

We study the effect of changes in CEO inside debt on equity and debt values during the period in which firms' disclosure of inside debt increased. We predict optimal CEO relative debt-equity incentive ratios based on firm and CEO characteristics, and show that firms adjust their ratios towards...

We reexamine long-term abnormal returns for portfolios sorted on governance characteristics. Firms with strong shareholder rights and firms with weak shareholder rights differ from the population of firms and from each other in how they cluster across industries. Using well specified tests under...

We show theoretically that optimism can lead a risk-averse CEO to choose the first-best investment level that maximizes shareholder value. Optimism below (above) the interior optimum leads the CEO to underinvest (overinvest). Hence, if boards of directors act in the interests of shareholders,...

Operating performance and stock return results imply that managers who commit fraud anticipate large stock price declines if they were to report truthfully, which would cause greater losses for managerial stockholdings than for options because of differences in convexity. Fraud firms have...

Using an intraday transaction dataset with trader identity, we study foreign and domestic investors' trading activities and investment performance ahead of open-ending events of Taiwanese closed-end funds. Simply buying the funds at a discount and holding until open ending generates large...

We reexamine long-term abnormal returns for portfolios sorted on governance characteristics. Firms with strong shareholder rights and firms with weak shareholder rights differ from the general population of firms and from each other in how they cluster across industries. Using tests that are...