Using a large sample of director elections, we document that shareholder votes are significantly related to firm performance, governance, director performance, and voting mechanisms. However, most variables, except meeting attendance and ISS recommendations, have little economic impact on...

Agency theories predict that the value of corporate cash holdings is less in countries with poor investor protection because of the greater ability of controlling shareholders to extract private benefits from cash holdings in such countries. Using various specifications of the valuation...

Despite the dramatic reduction in explicit barriers to international investment activity over the last 60 years, the impact of financial globalization has been surprisingly limited. I argue that country attributes are still critical to financial decision-making because of "twin agency problems"...

Acquiring-firm shareholders lost 12 cents around acquisition announcements per dollar spent on acquisitions for a total loss of $240 billion from 1998 through 2001, whereas they lost $7 billion in all of the 1980s, or 1.6 cents per dollar spent. The 1998 to 2001 aggregate dollar loss of...

We examine the evolution of insider ownership of IPO firms from 1970 to 2001 to understand how U.S. firms become widely held. A majority of these firms has insider ownership below 20% after 10 years. Stock market performance and liquidity play an extremely important role in ownership dynamics....