We evaluate whether management risk, coming from uncertainty about management's value added, affects firms' default risks and debt pricing. We find that, regardless of the reason for the turnover, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all increase at the time of management turnover,...

This paper uses proprietary data from a leading intermediary to understand the magnitude and determinants of transaction costs in the secondary market for private equity stakes. Most transactions occur at a discount to net asset value. Buyers average an annualized public market equivalent of...

A manager's current and potential future employers are continually assessing her or his ability. Such assessment is a crucial component of corporate governance and this chapter provides an overview of the research on that aspect of governance. In particular, we review how assessment generates...

We provide evidence that CEO equity incentives, especially stock options, influence stock liquidity risk via information disclosure quality. We document a negative association between CEO options and the quality of future managerial disclosure policy. Contributing to the literature on CEO...

There is a widespread belief among observers that a lower premium is paid when the target CEO is retained by the acquirer in a private equity deal because the CEO's potential conflicts of interest leads her to negotiate less aggressively on behalf of the target shareholders. Our empirical...

Corporate cash holdings impact firms' product pricing strategies. Exploiting the Aviation Investment and Reform Act of the 21st Century as a quasi-natural experiment to identify exogenous shocks to competition in the airline industry, I find that firms with more cash than their rivals respond to...

We investigate whether the value of large banks, defined as banks with assets in excess of the Dodd-Frank threshold for enhanced supervision, increases with the size of their assets using Tobin's q and market-to-book as our valuation measures. Many argue that large banks receive subsidies from...

Price-based liquidity metrics are better in 2013-2014 for small trades and large high-yield bond trades, but not for large investment grade bond trades, relative to before the crisis, and are better for all bond types and trade sizes relative to 2010-2012. This evidence contrasts with the...

The anomalies literature is infested with widespread p-hacking. We replicate this literature by compiling a large data library with 447 anomalies. With microcaps alleviated via NYSE breakpoints and value-weighted returns, 286 anomalies (64%) including 95 out of 102 liquidity variables (93%) are...

We use days with tail sovereign CDS spread changes of peripheral countries to identify the effects of shocks to the cost of borrowing of these countries on stock returns of banks from other countries. We find that tail sovereign GIIPS CDS changes have an asymmetric impact in that bank stocks...