Despite its importance, voting in the elections of corporate boards of directors remains relatively unexplored in the empirical literature. We construct a comprehensive dataset of 3,204,890 mutual fund votes in director elections that took place between July 2003 and June 2005. We find...

We show that institutional shareholders of acquiring companies on average do not lose money around public merger announcements, because they also hold substantial stakes in the targets and make up for the losses from the former with the gains from the latter. Depending on their holdings in the...

We use a unique dataset that combines information on advertising by subprime lenders and mortgages originated by them from 2002 to 2007 to study the relationship between advertising and the nature of mortgages obtained by consumers. We exploit the richness of our data and measure the relative...

We study the recent episode of bank failures and provide simple facts to better understand who acquires failed banks and which forces drive the losses that the FDIC realizes from these sales. We document three distinct forces related to the allocation of failed banks to potential acquirers....

When external capital markets are stressed they may not reallocate resources between firms. We show that resource allocation within firms' internal capital markets provides an important force countervailing financial market dislocation. Using data on US conglomerates we empirically verify that...

We show that delinquent loans are serviced differently depending on their securitization status. Conditional on a loan becoming seriously delinquent, we find a significantly lower foreclosure rate associated with loans held by the bank (`portfolio' loans) when compared to similar loans that are...

The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

We contend that buyers received false information about the true quality of assets in contractual disclosures by intermediaries during the sale of mortgages in the $2 trillion non-agency market. We construct two measures of misrepresentation of asset quality - misreported occupancy status of...

This paper investigates the impact of lower mortgage rates on household balance sheets and other economic outcomes during the housing crisis. We use proprietary loan-level panel data matched to consumer credit records using borrowers' Social Security numbers, which allows for accurate...