In this paper we use clinical studies to document how dominant shareholders have circumvented mandatory bid rules to appropriate wealth from minority shareholders. Dominant shareholders are numerous in continental Europe. Creative compliance with mandatory bid rules reveals the failure of boards...

Under German takeover law, in a voluntary bid the bidder must offer the target shareholders a price which is based on the average price of the target's shares over a given period.However, if in the run-up to the bid the bidder purchased the target shares at a higher price, the bid price must be...

We investigate the risk choices of risk averse CEOs. Following recent theoretical work, we expect CEO risk aversion to be more pronounced in firms with high leverage, or high default probability. We find that the CEOs of these firms reduce firm risk, even in the presence of strong risk taking...

We document that analysts cater to short-term investors by issuing optimistic target prices. Catering dominates among analysts at brokers without an investment banking arm as they face lower reputational cost. The market does not see through the analyst catering activity and their forecasts lead...

CEOs with substantial short-term monetary incentives behave myopically out of concerns for the stock price. One potential target for managerial myopia is corporate tax avoidance. We show that, ceteris paribus, CEO short-term monetary incentives are associated with declines in cash effective tax...