We find that corporate governance characteristics of acquiring firms (board ownership, board size, and block-holder control) have an economically and statistically significant impact on operating performance changes following mergers. We also show that dispersion of intra-board ownership stakes...

Utilizing the large subset of trades in which dealers act purely as agents, we decompose dealer spreads in U.S. corporate bond OTC markets into components arising from: 1) dealers' market-making role, and 2) their role as agents for their non-dealer customers. We investigate the determinants of...

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

Regulatory and media concern has focused heavily on the potentially manipulative distortion of market prices associated with naked short selling. However, naked shorting can also have beneficial effects for liquidity and pricing efficiency. We empirically investigate the impact of naked...

We investigate the association of various firm-specific and market-wide factors with the riskneutral skewness (RNS) implied by the prices of individual stock options. Our analysis covers 149 U.S. firms over a four-year period. Our choice of firms is based on adequate liquidity and trading...

We investigate the relation between corporate governance characteristics of hostile takeover targets and the choice to employ 'harmful' resistance that is not perceived as being motivated by shareholders' interests. We find that harmful resistance is associated with firms where managers have...