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...

We show that firms located geographically close to one another share a similar probability of having staggered boards (or classified boards), an effect probably due to investor clientele, local competition, and social interactions. We then exploit the variation across the zip codes in the...