We analyze the valuation effect of board industry experience and channels through which industry experience of outside directors affects firm value. Firms with more experienced outside directors are valued at a premium compared to firms with less experienced outside directors. Additional tests...

We investigate whether investor reactions to the announcement of a new outside director appointment significantly depend on the director’s experience in the appointing firm’s industry. We use a sample of 385 outside directors appointed to the board of S&P 500 companies from 2008 to 2010. Our...

We use a proprietary dataset from a large Swiss retail bank to examine the impact of financial advice on individual investors’ stock trading performance and their behavioral biases. Our data allows us to classify each individual trade as either advised or independent and to compare them in a...

We investigate how share restrictions affect hedge fund performance in crisis and non-crisis periods. Consistent with prior research, we find that in the pre-crisis period more illiquid funds generate a share illiquidity premium compensating investors for limited liquidity. In the crisis period,...

This paper investigates the problem of time stamp errors in the IBES database. We show that IBES did not store the original announcement date of both recommendations and forecasts on U.S. stocks until 2001 and even later for other countries. The announcement date in IBES is often effectively the...

We study how firm-bank relationships and corporate financing evolved during the Twentieth century in Britain. We document a remarkable transition from single to multiple relationships. Transparent, larger, and global companies were more likely to add a bank, especially when located in more...

An intense debate on the use of limited-voting shares developed in the UK during the 1950s. Using a unique hand-collected dataset, we show that negative news coverage of limited-voting shares is associated with an increase in the relative price of voting and limited-voting shares (the voting...

The late-Victorian era was characteristed by especially close links between politicians and firms in the UK. Roughly half of all members of Parliament served as company directors, many as directors of multiple firms. We analyze 467 British companies over the period 1895 to 1904 to investigate...

This paper studies the relationships between managers’ a¢ liations with Freema- sonry and companies' performance. Using a unique data set of 410 companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange between 1895 and 1902, I find that Masonic managers were associated with greater access to credit in...