This paper compares investor sentiment measures based on consumer confidence surveys with measures extracted from the closed-end fund discount (CEFD). Our evidence suggests that these two kinds of sentiment measures do not correlate well with one another. For a short 2 - 4 year period in which...

This paper shows that firms engage in less M&A activity when they have large public pension fund (PPF) owners. For example, the presence of a 5% PPF blockholder reduces the frequency of acquisitions by about 7%. An extra 3% in ownership by the top PPF owner reduces the size of acquisition...

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...

Our model assumes that creditors need to expend resources to collect on claims. Consequently, because diffuse creditors suffer from mutual free-riding (Holmstrom (1982)), they fare worse than concentrated creditors (e.g. a house bank). The model predicts that measures of debt concentration...

It is now well known that the Sharpe ratio and other related reward-to-risk measures may be manipulated with option-like strategies. In this paper we derive the general conditions for achieving the maximum expected Sharpe ratio. We derive static rules for achieving the maximum Sharpe ratio with...

This paper offers a novel explanation for why some firms prefer to pay dividends rather than repurchase shares. It is well-known that institutional investors are relatively less taxed than individual investors, and that this induces "dividend clientele" effects. We argue that these clientele...

This discussion piece argues that situations in which there are two similarly strong contestants (Symmetry) are often marked by long and expensive struggles for advantage and power. In contrast, an arrangement in which only one party gets access to all/most resources (Asymmetry) can minimize the...