This article illustrates an incentive-aligning role of debt in the presence of optimal compensation contracts. Owing to information asymmetry, value-maximizing compensation contracts allow managerial rents following high investment outcomes. The manager has an incentive to increase these rents...

Why is the issuer's reservation price not disclosed in bookbuilding? We analyze the differential effect of reservation price disclosure on the underpricing required to elicit truthful indications of interest from investors. We find that a policy of disclosure would increase proceeds for firms...

Cross-border mergers allow firms to alter the level of protection they provide to their investors, because target firms usually import the corporate governance system of the acquiring company by law. Therefore, cross-border mergers provide a natural experiment to analyze the effects of changes...

A well-known numerical lattice model, widely used to value employee stock options (ESOs), can be interpreted as a variation on the up-and-out protected barrier call, a version of which is valued in closed form by Carr (1995). We clarify that valuation formula and extend it to take account of the...