Employee compensation may impact payout policy by (i) incentivizing managers with non-dividend-protected options to favor repurchases over dividends and (ii) diluting earnings, which firms can neutralize through share repurchases. Both the dividend-protection and dilution channels imply a...

Both risk management and payout decisions affect a firm's financial flexibility — the ability to avoid costly financial distress as well as underinvestment. We provide evidence of substitution between hedging and payout decisions using samples of both financial and nonfinancial firms. We find...

This paper studies the strategic use and timing of share repurchases by insiders for personal gain. Using grant level compensation data and a hand-collected sample of monthly repurchases, I find a positive causal relation between CEO equity sales and share repurchases. I identify the relation...

The value a director provides to a firm is empirically hard to establish. We estimate that value by exploiting the commonality in idiosyncratic returns of firms linked by a director and show that, on average, a single director's influence causes variation in firm value of almost 1% per year. The...

We explore three ways to classify mutual funds as ESG-oriented: by their names, their voting records, and their holdings. ESG-named funds and ESG-voting funds tend to be smaller than non-ESG funds, and spread their investment over more individual companies. They never control more than a quarter...

We assess whether a VC’s intrinsic commitment to a startup affects investment performance. We proxy for climate change commitment using the political contributions to democrats of the lead VC person on a deal. We find investments by democrats in climate-related startups have 8% higher...

We identify important conflicts of interests among shareholders and examine their effects on corporate decisions. When a firm is considering an action that affects other firms in its shareholders' portfolios, shareholders with heterogeneous portfolios may disagree about whether to proceed. This...