Zero-cost collars and equity swaps provide insiders with the opportunity to hedge the risk associated with their personal holdings in the company's equity. Consequently, their use has important implications for incentive-based contracting and for understanding insider trading behavior. Our...

This study uses a large sample of firms to examine how human capital considerations affect the process of CEO succession. Costs and benefits of succession planning are affected by a firm's level of operational complexity and human capital requirements; firms that are more complex incur greater...

We provide a comprehensive examination of shareholder resolutions to rescind poison pills. We find that pill rescission proposals are more frequent the more negative the market reaction to the initial pill adoption and the lower the insider and unaffiliated block ownership. Votes for such a...

We examine the impact of explicitly incorporating a measure of debt capacity in recent tests of competing theories of capital structure. Our main results are that if external funds are required, in the absence of debt capacity concerns, debt appears to be preferred to equity. Concerns over debt...