We report evidence on the determinants of whether the relationship between a firm and its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is governed by an explicit (written) or an implicit agreement. We find that fewer than half of the CEOs of S&P 500 firms have comprehensive explicit employment agreements....

This article examines incentives for adopting antitakeover charter amendments (ATAs) that are associated with compensational contracts. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that antitakeover measures such as ATAs help managers protect above-market levels of compensation. Chief...

This paper investigates informed trading on stock volatility in the option market. We construct non-market maker net demand for volatility from the trading volume of individual equity options and find that this demand is informative about the future realized volatility of underlying stocks. We...

This paper analyzes the early exercise of exchange-traded options by different classes of investors over the 1996 to 1999 period. A large number of exercises are identified as clearly irrational without invoking any model of market equilibrium. Customers of discount brokers and customers of...

This paper investigates options market reaction to changes in the instantaneous variance of the underlying asset. There are three main findings. First, options market investors underreact to individual daily changes in instantaneous variance. Second, these same investors overreact to periods of...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Managers often claim that target firms are financially constrained prior to being acquired and that these constraints are eased following the acquisition. Using a large sample of European acquisitions, we document that the level of cash that target firms hold, the...</p>

Private equity funds are important to the economy, yet there is little analysis explaining their financial structure. In our model the financial structure minimizes agency conflicts between fund managers and investors. Relative to financing each deal separately, raising a fund where the manager...

We model a firm's demand for liquidity to develop a new test of the effect of financial constraints on corporate policies. The effect of financial constraints is captured by the firm's propensity to save cash out of cash flows (the "cash flow sensitivity of cash"). We hypothesize that...

Unlike Dutch auction repurchases and tender offers, open-market repurchase programs do not precommit firms to acquire a specified number of shares. In a sample of 450 programs from 1981 to 1990, firms on average acquire 74 to 82 percent of the shares announced as repurchase targets within three...