We investigate the effects of shareholder governance mechanisms on bondholders and document two new findings. First, the impact of shareholder control (proxied by large institutional blockholders) on credit risk depends on takeover vulnerability. Shareholder control is associated with higher...

Although the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) received nearly unanimous congressional support, only a few years thereafter its wisdom was increasingly questioned and its supporters had to stave off attempts to recraft the legislation. The financial crisis of 2008 has sidelined efforts...

It is well known that cross-listing domestic stocks in foreign exchanges has significant valuation effects on the listed company's shares. Using a sample of firms with dual shares, we explore the differential effects of cross-listing on prices and we are able to separate the different sources of...

This chapter reviews the empirical literature, especially the event study literature, as it relates to corporate and securities law. Event studies are among the most successful uses of econometrics in policy analysis. By providing an anchor for measuring the impact of events on investor wealth,...

International law prescribes that in a cross-border merger where the acquiror buys 100 percent of the target, the target firm becomes a national of the country of the acquiror. Among other effects, the change in nationality implies a change in investor protection, because the law that is...

Financial economists and commercial providers of governance services have in recent years created measures of the quality of firms' corporate governance which collapse into a single number (a governance index or rating) the multiple dimensions of a company's governance. The aim of this paper is...

Corporate law is an arena in which the metaphor of the states as a laboratory describes actual practice, and, for the most part, this is a laboratory that has worked reasonably well. The goal of this paper is to map out over time the diffusion of corporate law reforms across the states. The...

This paper provides an evaluation of the substantive corporate governance mandates of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that is informed by the relevant empirical accounting and finance literature and the political dynamics that produced the mandates. The empirical literature provides a metric for...

This article provides an analysis of why regulatory competition in corporate law has operated, for the most part, successfully in the United States, and critiques the position of commentators who are skeptical of the significance and extent of state competition. The article begins by setting out...

This paper shows that the presence of large public pension fund shareholders particularly reduces acquisitions by cash-rich and low-q firms, and by firms seeking to ``buy growth'', after controlling for ownership endogeneity, firm-level governance structure, and other firm characteristics. When...