Working Paper
Markup Pricing Revisited
We examine whether pre-bid target stock price runups lower bidder takeover gains and deter short-term toehold purchases in the runup period. A dollar increase in the runup raises the initial offer price by $0.80 (markup pricing)....
How Investors Can (and Can't) Create Social Value
Most investors have a single goal: to earn the highest financial return. These socially-neutral investors maximize their risk-adjusted returns and would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced...
Socially Responsible Corporate Customers
Corporate customers are an important stakeholder in global supply chains. We employ several unique international databases to test whether socially responsible corporate customers can infuse similar socially responsible...
Stock Market Short-Termism’s Impact
Stock-market–driven short-termism is crippling the American economy, according to legal, judicial, and media analyses. Firms forgo the R&D they need, cut capital spending, and buy back their own stock so feverishly that they...
Appraisal Waivers
A judicial determination of fair value in a private company can be a difficult and imprecise process. This difficulty coupled with variations in way mergers are negotiated and structured and the potential for conflicts of interest...
Value Creation in Shareholder Activism: A Structural Approach
We model an investor’s choice between filing Schedules 13D and 13G and use the model to estimate expected returns to activist and passive investing. Using the model, we decompose average Schedule 13D filing announcement returns into...
Should Corporations Have a Purpose?
The hot topic in corporate governance is the debate over corporate purpose and, in particular, whether corporations should shift their purpose from the pursuit of shareholder wealth to pursuing a broader conception of stakeholder or...
Growing Up Under Mao and Deng: On the Ideological Determinants of Corporate Policies
Historically, economic activities have been organized around certain ideologies. We investigate the impact of politicians’ ideology on corporate policies by exploring a unique setting of ideological change—China from Mao to...
Value of Politically Connected Independent Directors: Evidence from the Anti-Corruption Campaign in China
A new regulation issued in the end of 2013 as part of the anti-corruption campaign in China leads to a wave of resignation of politically connected independent directors (PCID). I find while firms with PCIDs have...Read more
Corporate Control, Dual Class, and the Limits of Judicial Review
Companies with a dual-class structure have increasingly been involved in highprofile battles over the reallocation of control rights. Google, for instance, sought to entrench its founders’ control by recapitalizing from a...
The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune
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...