Shareholder rights vary across firms. Using the incidence of 24 unique governance rules, we construct a quot;Governance Indexquot; to proxy for the level of shareholder rights at about 1500 large firms during the 1990s. An investment strategy that bought firms in the lowest decile of the index...

Shareholder rights vary across firms. Using the incidence of 24 unique governance rules, we construct a quot;Governance Indexquot; to proxy for the level of shareholder rights at about 1500 large firms during the 1990s. An investment strategy that bought firms in the lowest decile of the index...

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider's cash flow rights and voting rights with firm value,...

Large blocks of stock play an important role in many studies of corporate governance and finance. Despite this important role, there is no standardized data set for these blocks, and the best available data source, Compact Disclosure, has many mistakes and biases. In this paper, we document...

This paper analyzes institutional investors' demand for stock characteristics and the implications of this demand for stock prices and returns. We find that quot;largequot; institutional investors nearly doubled their share of the stock market from 1980 to 1996. Overall, this compositional shift...

This paper investigates the effect of social ties between acquirers and targets on merger performance. Using data on educational background and past employment, we construct a measure of the extent of cross-firm social connection between directors and senior executives at the acquiring and the...

Corporate-governance provisions related to takeover defenses and shareholder rights vary substantially across firms. In this paper, we use the incidence of 24 different provisions to build a 'Governance Index' for about 1,500 firms per year, and then we study the relationship between this index...

We construct and analyze a comprehensive list of dual-class firms in the United States and use this list to investigate the relationship between insider ownership and firm value. Our data has two useful features for this valuation analysis. First, since dual-class stock separates cash-flow...

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider's cash flow rights and voting rights with firm value,...