Using a large panel of U.S. public firms, we examine the relation between annual report readability and cost of equity capital. We hypothesize that complex textual reporting deters investors’ ability to process and interpret annual reports, leading to higher information risk, and thus higher...

This study examines the link between product market competition and labor investment efficiency. We find that competitive pressure distorts the efficiency of corporate employment decisions by creating an underinvestment problem. This finding withstands a battery of robustness checks and remains...

This paper investigates the role of peer effects in the employee welfare policies of organizations. Using US panel data for a sample of 11,451 firm-year observations from 1996 to 2017, we find that firms’ employee welfare decisions are driven by their peers and show that peer firms play a...

We investigate the role of multiple large shareholders (MLS) in corporate risk-taking. Using a sample of publicly listed French family firms over the period 2003-2012, we show that the presence, number, and voting power of MLS are associated with higher risk-taking. Our results suggest that MLS...

The current study investigates the determinants of going private (GP) in France. It contrasts a sample of 161 firms that went private between 1997 and 2009 with a propensity-score-matched sample of firms that remained public during the same period. The results indicate that, unlike for firms...

The present study investigates the sources of shareholder wealth gains – as measured by cumulative abnormal returns and premiums – from going private transactions (GPTs). Using data for 314 GPTs from 18 Western European countries, we find that the announcements of GPTs generate a cumulative...

Theoretical literature (Jensen and Meckling, 1976 and Edmans and Liu, 2011) argues that inside debt – pension benefits and deferred compensation – has debt-like payoffs, and can therefore curb executives' excessive risk-taking incentives created by equity holdings. We test this theory in the...