Following surprise independent director departures, affected firms have worse stock and
operating performance, are more likely to restate earnings, face shareholder litigation,
suffer from an extreme negative return event, and make...Read more
This paper links the CEO’s concerns for the current stock price to reductions in real investment. We identify short-term concerns using the amount of stock and options scheduled to vest in a given quarter. A one standard deviation increase in...Read more
This paper shows that improving financial efficiency may reduce real efficiency. While the former depends on the total amount of information available, the latter depends on the relative amounts of hard and soft information. Disclosing more hard...Read more
As firms have more assets in place, more of management?s limited attention is focused on managing assets in place rather than developing new growth options. Consequently, as firms grow older, they have fewer growth options and a lower ability to...Read more
There are numerous studies on the effectiveness of boards that primarily focus on legal formalities, including gender diversity, board size, remuneration, board evaluation and the role of the chairman of the board. While attempting to design a...Read more
We present a model where firms compete for scarce managerial talent ("alpha") and managers are risk-averse. When managers cannot move across firms after being hired, employers learn about their talent, allocate them efficiently to projects and...Read more
Separation between CEO and Chairman of the Board is typically viewed as evidence of good corporate governance. Surprisingly, the literature has failed so far to uncover any significant relation between CEO/Chairman duality and firm performance....Read more
Shareholder valuations are economically and statistically positively correlated with independent directors? power, gauged by social network power centrality. Powerful independent directors? sudden deaths reduce shareholder value significantly;...Read more
This paper studies the factors that influence the CEO succession decision in family firms
whose incumbent CEO is a member of the controlling family. The sample includes all
such firms from France, Germany and the UK. We propose a new...Read more
This paper develops and tests a new theoretical explanation for why a firm conducts open-market and privately-negotiated stock repurchases. Investors may disagree with the manager about the firm?s investment projects. A repurchase causes a change...Read more
Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to...Read more
In this paper, we first shed light on the factors that underlie the differences between the ?shareholder wealth maximization? and the ?long-term commitment? models of corporate governance. By introducing a third type of governance model, we show...Read more