We find significant relations between active mutual fund portfolio holdings and executive compensation, which appear to be largely driven by mutual fund investment styles rather than monitoring behaviour. Aggressive growth fund holdings are associated with performance pay, while income fund holdings are negatively related. We also find that mutual fund holdings are insensitive to changes in exe...

I show that firms may optimally sell blocks of their own equity to other firms in anticipation of future corporate control activity. In the model, a target and one potential acquirer, who may also be an alliance partner, can negotiate before synergy values are learned. I find that equity implements an optimal mechanism, allowing the partners to extract surplus from outside bidders who may arriv...

Abstract We study U.S. banks’ payout policy in 2007–2008. benchmark these payouts against before the crisis, measure stock price reactions to announcements of dividend changes, and analyze changes relation between growth future performance. Further, we examine cross-sectional variation gauge possible motives underlying decisions do not find that banks have a higher willingness take risk or ince...

ABSTRACT Insurance pricing is subject to stricter regulation in some states than others. This cross-sectional variation, coupled with the occurrence of staggered deregulation several states, enables a powerful test political cost hypothesis that managers manipulate accruals mitigate adverse effects rate regulation. We show insurers understate their loss reserve more regulated regimes, finding c...

The aim of this study is to examine the impact legal audit quality on likelihood accounting fraud, for a sample 48 companies listed Tunisian stock market over period between 2014 and 2018. Based logit panel regression, we have shown that firm's membership in one Big networks rotation external auditors are two major determinants reduction cases fraud companies. In addition, results showed joint ...

ABSTRACT We investigate whether firms manage stock prices in anticipation of share issuance. Warrant exercise results issuance and warrant expiration dates are fixed years advance, which precludes market timing. predict to prevent (induce) when is dilutive (anti-dilutive) existing shareholders. To test our prediction, we examine returns around dates. find that the difference between out-of-the-...

The sharp distinction drawn between firms rated narrowly above (BBB–) and below (BB+) the investment-grade cutoff provides variation in debt financing availability unrelated to firm fundamentals. We exploit this market segmentation to identify an asymmetric effect of debt capital supply on voluntary disclosure: BB+ firms step up disclosure in response to high-yield bond mutual fund outflows. Th...

We measure U.S. publicly traded companies’ exposures to skilled labor risk, i.e., the potential failure in attracting and retaining skilled labor, by the intensity of their discussions on this issue in their 10-K filings. We show that this measure effectively captures firm risk due to the mobility of skilled labor. We find that skilled labor risk is an important determinant of corporate compens...

This article reports a unique analysis of private engagements by an activist fund. It is based on data made available to us by Hermes, the fund manager owned by the British Telecom Pension Scheme, on engagements with management in companies targeted by its UK Focus Fund. In contrast with most previous studies of activism, we report that the fund executes shareholder activism predominantly throu...

We examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and performance of recipient firms, using of panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We find that joint-ventures perform better than wholly foreign owned and purely domestic firms. Although productivity and profitability initially rise with foreign ownership, they start declining once foreign ownership reaches ...