Lawyers and financial economists have fundamentally different views of anti-takeover statutes. While corporate lawyers and academics generally dismiss these statutes as irrelevant, economists study them empirically and conclude that they – and hence the threat of a takeover – affect firm and...

We investigate the structure of mutual funds' corporate governance preferences as revealed by how they vote their shares in portfolio companies. We apply standard unsupervised learning tools from the machine learning literature to analyze a comprehensive dataset of mutual funds' votes and find...

Exploiting a hand-collected database with almost 2200 firms during 1996-2014, I analyze the relationship between the presence of poison pills and firm value. Consistent with earlier results, I document a strong negative association between pills and firm value cross-sectionally and within firm....

This article focuses on the widely held views that antitakeover charter and bylaw provisions (ATPs) increase agency costs, thereby reducing firm value, but that firms going public minimize agency costs, thereby maximizing firm value. We show that these views cannot comfortably coexist: ATPs are...