Prior research shows that religion promotes honesty. Honesty in turn motivates managers to view an expropriation from shareholders as self-serving, opportunistic, and unethical, thereby alleviating the agency conflict. Religious piety is thus expected to discourage agency-driven acquisitions...

Because religious piety induces individuals to be more honest and risk-averse, it makes managers less likely to exploit shareholders, thereby mitigating the agency conflict and potentially influencing governance arrangements. We exploit the variation in religious piety across U.S. counties and...

Some firms choose not to use an investment bank advisor in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions. We test whether this decision affects the merger announcement period returns. We compare the abnormal returns from a sample of 179 in-house acquisitions (in which either the acquirer or the...

Capitalizing on a distinctive measure of takeover susceptibility mainly based on the staggered passage of anti-takeover state legislations, we examine the effect of the takeover market on corporate leverage. Stretching over half a century from 1964 to 2014, our sample includes nearly 180,000...