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...

Many mergers destroy shareholder value because managers intentionally waste corporate resources to pursue private benefits. Using textual analysis, we link industry conditions as reflected in acquirer peers' 10-K statements to acquirer announcement abnormal returns. We find that more negative...

Why does the market react to companies’ announcements of strategic alternatives with a +5.2 percent return, only to experience a future return of -9.7 percent? We find evidence consistent with a mispricing explanation in that: (i) investors and analysts are overly optimistic about a potential...

Objective: Introduced in the 1980s in the USA, the search fund model as a niche financial instrument of entrepreneurship through acquisition has not yet become popular outside North America. This article responds to the question whether search fund could be an interesting model for Central...

A key objective of shareholder activists is to persuade a firm’s management to change its strategy. CFOs play an important role in negotiations, nonetheless activism research mainly focuses on CEOs. We examine the relationship between CFO overconfidence and the likelihood to get targeted by...

The notion of stock-market-driven short-termism relentlessly whittling away at the American economy’s foundations is widely accepted and highly salient. Presidential candidates state as much. Senators introduce bills assuming as much. Corporate interests argue as much to the Securities and...

Based on the perspective of the industry peer effect, this paper explains the imitation motivation and internal mechanism of listed companies in implementing employee stock ownership plans, and conducts an empirical test based on the data of listed companies in China from 2014 to 2019. From our...

In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by EY. The Report purports to find evidence of debilitating short-termism in EU corporate governance and recommends many changes to support sustainable corporate...

This paper investigates whether executives with thrill-seeking tendencies engage in greater tax avoidance. Our results show a strong negative association between CEO thrill-seeking and a firm’s cash effective tax rate. We further find that thrill-seeking has a considerably stronger effect on...

What precisely is stock market short-termism? For an issue that pervades corporate governance thinking, rhetoric, and policymaking, one would think that we know well what it is. But much that’s called stock market short-termism is not properly categorized as such. This distinction—between...