We provide one of the first large sample comparisons of cash policies in public and private U.S. firms. We first show that on average private firms hold less than half as much cash as public firms do. The higher cash holdings of public firms are partially caused by the fact that public firms add...

A common view in the literature is that the director labor market provides an ex post settling-up for past decisions by rewarding CEO ability and actions that are consistent with shareholder interests. In this paper we focus on large CEO acquisition decisions to investigate whether the director...

We provide one of the first large sample comparisons of cash policies in public and private U.S. firms. We first show that despite higher financing frictions, private firms hold, on average, about half as much cash as public firms do. By examining the drivers of cash policies for each group, we...

We find that to mitigate refinancing risk caused by shorter maturity debt, firms increase their cash holdings and save more cash from their cash flows. We also document that the maturity of U.S. firms' long-term debt has markedly shortened over the 1980-2008 period and that this shortening...

About half of all merger deals between public US acquirers and targets involve a conference call within two days of the deal announcement, in order to communicate information to both acquirer and target shareholders to garner voting support and mitigate legal liability. Calls are associated with...

We identify important conflicts of interests among shareholders and examine their effects on corporate decisions. When a firm is considering an action that affects other firms in its shareholders' portfolios, shareholders with heterogeneous portfolios may disagree about whether to proceed. This...

Debt, and in particular, short-term debt have the potential to discipline managers. We examine the role of the board in making financing decisions that provide this discipline. Specifically, given a firm's characteristics, we predict that stronger boards will force the firm to hold more debt and...

We explore whether compensation policies in bidding firms counter or exacerbate agency conflicts by examining CEO pay and incentives around corporate takeovers. We find that even in mergers where bidding shareholders are worse off, bidding CEOs are better off three quarters of the time. In fact,...

We examine the relation between the management of cash holdings and corporate governance. We find that firms with weaker corporate governance have smaller cash reserves. Further tests suggest that these firms dissipate their cash reserves more quickly than do managers of firms with stronger...