We document a strong positive initial market reaction to merger announcements from bidders with either large earnings growth or significant earnings decline, relative to those with neutral earnings change, reflecting a U-shaped pattern between bidders’ earnings growth and announcement returns....

After decades of de-prioritizing shareholders' economic interests and low corporate profitability, Japan introduced the JPX-Nikkei400 in 2014. The index highlighted the country's “best-run" companies by annually selecting the 400 most profitable of its large and liquid firms. We find that...

The impact of the announcement of a takeover bid has been widely tested in foreign literature. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to research the impact of the announcement of a takeover bid on the share price movements in the Croatian capital market and whether the results are consistent...

Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more “intangibles talk” complete more quickly. However, the value of these deals to...

We study whether the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms varies depending on the characteristics of the executives subject to these mechanisms - namely, their “psychological type”, as proxied by their history of legal infractions. In particular, we examine insider trading, where...

Using micro data on managerial expenditures, we uncover heuristics in capital budgets, such as nominal rigidity, anchoring, and sharp reset deadlines. Such heuristics engender managerial opportunism and erode investment efficiency. Managers with a budget surplus increase investment sharply...

Under a powerful narrative, Wall Street and its obsession with short-term profits are one of the main reasons why corporations—and by extension our economic system—are failing society. In Missing the Target: Why Stock-Market Short-Termism Is Not the Problem, Professor Mark Roe challenges...

We propose that when firm agents, such as managers and employees, perceive the board to have congruent values about ESG activities with them, then they are more willing to commit their human capital and effort to the ESG activities to increase firm value. Potentially positive NPV ESG projects...

We examine CEO partisanship and the speed of adjustment to target leverage ratios. Republicans, who prior literature views as risk-averse, are expected to move more aggressively to their targets when over-levered and more slowly when under-levered. However, Republicans’ dislike of taxes...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between firm-specific investor sentiment, measured by applying text analysis to news stories published by Thomson Reuters, and merger and acquisition (M&A) deals announced by US-listed companies between 1997 and 2018. We find that a more positive...