We study a wide-spread yet unexplored corporate governance phenomenon: the pledging of company stock by insiders as collateral for personal bank loans. Utilizing a regulatory change that exogenously decreases pledging, we document a negative causal impact of pledging on shareholder wealth. We...

We examine the potential for management-worker alliances when employees have substantial voting rights, and how such alliances affect the balance of power between managers and shareholders. We find that substantial employee voting rights exacerbate the manager-shareholder conflicts....

We study how the existence of important production contracts affects the choice of CEO compensation contracts. We hypothesize that having major customers raises the costs associated with CEO risk-taking incentives and leads to lower option-based compensation. Using industry-level import tariff...

Using hand-collected data, we examine the targeting of shareholder class action lawsuits in merger & acquisition (M&A) transactions, and the associations of these lawsuits with offer completion rates and takeover premia. We find that M&A offers subject to shareholder lawsuits are completed at a...

We examine the economic benefits of acquisitions of U.S. public firms. Estimating revelation biases concerning internal investment opportunities, we find that it produces a significant negative bidder announcement effect, often interpreted as shareholder wealth destruction. Examining exogenously...