We find evidence that labor unions affect CEO compensation. First, we find that firms with strong unions pay their CEOs less. The negative effect is robust to various tests for endogeneity, including cross-sectional variations and a regression discontinuity design. Second, we find that CEO...

We examine the time trends and determinants of the method of payment in M&As spanning four decades. The fraction of mixed payments tripled from about 10% before the turn of the century to 30% in the new century, while the fraction of stock (cash) payments peaked (bottomed out) in the late 1990s...

We document that the likelihood of asset sales increases with union presence and union wages. Furthermore, acquiring firms gain significant concessions from the incumbent union following asset sales. Finally, the anticipation of union concessions helps explain the excess stock returns around...

We report that when states adopt a doctrine that reduces the risk that employees transfer to rival firms, affected firms respond by cutting option grants to both executives and rank-and-file (R&F) employees, especially if the firms have high R&D and nearby rivals. The reverse occurs if the...

We study the effect of trust on debt contracting. We find that, after the revelation of option backdating, borrowers that likely backdated their previous option grants pay higher interest rates on loans. This adverse effect is mitigated by CEO replacements. Conversely, we find no impact on the...

Change-in-control covenants were first introduced at the tail-end of the LBO wave in the 1980s. We report that, like bondholders in the 1980s, bondholders lacking such covenant protection experience significantly negative wealth effects of -6.76% upon the announcement of an LBO, compared to...

We evaluated various multiples practitioners use to estimate company value. We found, first, that the asset multiple (market value to book value of assets) generally generates more precise and less biased estimates than do the sales and the earnings multiples. Second, although adjusting for...

Firms that undertake corporate events often exhibit atypical financial characteristics, such that future performance might be expected to change even before the event is announced. I investigate five methods for generating control samples in various sampling situations. The results indicate that...

We examine the effects of Chinese import penetration on executive compensation of US firms. We find that import penetration reduces executives' total compensation, stock grants, wealth-performance sensitivity, and opportunistic grant timing, suggesting that competition mitigates agency problems...