We examine the relationship between protracted CEO successions and stock returns. In protracted successions, an incumbent CEO announces his or her resignation without a known successor, so the incumbent CEO becomes a “lame duck.” We find that 31% of CEO successions from 2005 to 2014 in the...

Private equity funds intermediate investment and affect portfolio firm performance by actively engaging in operational, governance, and financial engineering. We study this type of intermediation in a dynamic agency model in which an active intermediary raises funds from outside investors and...