After decades of declining litigation risk, independent directors of public companies are viewed as effectively immune to personal litigation costs. However, the unexpected In re Investors Bancorp decision by the Delaware Supreme Court in 2017 lowered the liability threshold only for directors...

This study examines the spillover effect of securities litigation. Peers of the sued firm have negative three-day abnormal returns around case filings and continue underperforming over sixty trading days. Peers also improve financial reporting quality and change qualitative disclosure...

This study introduces a new measure of ex ante litigation risk using scrutiny of SEC filings by the source of securities litigation—plaintiffs' lawyers—to reduce measurement error, relative to existing measures. We show that plaintiff-lawyer views proxy for the largely unobservable factors...

The allegation that activist investors demand changes that increase short-term stock prices at the expense of long-term shareholder value (“short-termism”) has led to extensive research on interventions by hedge funds. Few studies include other private (non-hedge fund) activists, even though...

Using a sample of bank-years from 2005 to 2017, we examine the effect of internal control quality on future risk-taking and performance. We find that banks that disclose a material weakness in internal controls have higher risk-taking and worse performance in the future, including having a...