This study uses the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement as a source of exogenous shock to product markets to establish a causal effect of competition on acquisition returns to shareholders. Following the agreement, acquirers exposed to greater increases in competitive pressure experience higher announcement returns. The positive impact of increased competition is stronger in acquirers with re...

This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two new identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in geographic diversity reduced BHC valuations. We also find that the geographic diversification of BHC ass...

SYNOPSIS Demand for chief financial officer (CFO) service on corporate boards has grown substantially in recent years, leading to questions about how outside board appointments affect a CFO’s ability fulfill their home firm responsibilities. In this paper, we focus the core responsibility of overseeing reporting quality, and explore types situations where may lead either learning opportunities ...

The main motivation of this paper is to study the impact of the composition of creditors on the probability of default and the corresponding default risk premium on sovereign bonds, when there is debtor moral hazard. In the absence of any legal enforcement, relational contracts work only when there are creditors who have a repeated relationship with the borrower. We show that ownership structur...

This paper examines how control and ownership structure affect share repurchases in an emerging market where controlling families derive large private benefits. Whereas firms with concentrated ownership often pay cash dividends, firms with weak control rights often repurchase shares. The magnitude of repurchase increases with weak control rights, but decreases with strong foreign ownership. The...

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Some countries especially in continental Europe exhibit a corporatist politicoeconomic equilibrium with a substantial protection of insiders on both markets. The more important money is in political decision-making, the more divided the workfor...

Does corporate diversification reduce shareholder value? Since firms endogenously choose to diversify, exogenous variation in diversification is necessary to draw inferences about the causal effect. We examine changes in the within-firm dispersion of industry investment, or ‘‘diversity’’. We find that exogenous changes in diversity, due to changes in industry investment, are negatively related ...

We examine firms that reprice their executive stock options and find little evidence that repricing reflects managerial entrenchment or ineffective governance. Repricing grants are economically significant, but there is little else unusual about compensation in repricing firms. Repricers tend to be smaller, younger, rapidly growing firms that experience a deep, sudden shock to growth and profit...

This article examines how accounting transparency and corporate governance interact. Firms with better governance are associated with higher abnormal returns, but even more so if they also have higher transparency. The effect is largely monotonic—it is small and insignificant for opaque firms and large and significant for transparent firms—and survives numerous robustness tests. We find support...

We investigate CEO compensation for completing M&A deals. We find that CEOs who have more power to influence board decisions receive significantly larger bonuses. We also find a positive relation between bonus compensation and measures of effort, but not between bonus compensation and deal performance. CEOs with more power also tend to engage in larger deals relative to the size of their own fi...