Capital structure and corporate governance are the important areas that represent salient part of corporate finance research. By studying various aspects of the two areas, this study attempts to deepen our understanding of the two. First, this study provides both a theoretical model and...

This thesis presents two essays in Corporate Finance. In the first essay, I use the August 2007 crisis episode to gauge the effect of financial contracting on real firm behavior. I identify heterogeneity in financial contracting at the onset of the crisis by exploiting ex-ante variation in...

In the first chapter of this dissertation, entitled “Signaling and Value Creation in Mergers,” I analyze the acquirers in both withdrawn and completed merger deals to disentangle the effects of signaling from those of target valuation and expected synergies. Completed stock (cash) acquirers...

We use instrumental variables methods to disentangle the effect of founder–CEOs on performance from the effect of performance on founder–CEO status. Our instruments for founder–CEO status are the proportion of the firm's founders that are dead and the number of people who founded the...

Executives can only impact firm outcomes if they have influence over crucial decisions. Based on this idea we develop and test the hypothesis that firms whose CEOs have more decision-making power should experience more variability in performance. We construct proxies for the CEO's power to...

Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Hermalin and Weisbach (2003) survey. The two questions most asked about boards are what determines their makeup and what determines their actions? These questions are...