We exploit the staggered adoption of the universal demand (UD) laws across U.S. states, which impedes shareholder rights to initiate derivative lawsuits, as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the relation between shareholder litigation rights and firm capital structures. We find that weaker...

I use a negative exogenous shock to the ability to file shareholder initiated class action lawsuits, the passage of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, to test the effect of the probability of being sued on a firm's capital structure. After the Act's passage, firms with the...

I estimate the relationship between increased creditor rights and legal expenditures of debtor corporations by analyzing the effect of a major securitization law in India allowing secured creditors to seize collateral. While the law decreased spending on legal proceedings commonly used by firms...

Leveraging as a quasi-natural experiment the staggered passage of universal demand laws, which raise the difficulty of shareholder lawsuits, we examine the effect of shareholder litigation rights on ESG controversies. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that an exogenous decline in...

We investigate the effect of shareholder litigation risk on corporate culture. We measure corporate culture by a novel machine learning metric following Li et al. (2021). Exploiting exogenous declines in shareholder litigation rights and derivative lawsuit risk following the staggered adoption...

Because representative shareholder litigation has been constrained by numerous legal developments, the corporate governance system has developed new mechanisms as alternative means to address managerial agency costs. We posit that recent significant governance developments in the corporate world...

We investigate the Dead Hand Proxy Put, a contractual innovation in corporate debt agreements that may impact hedge fund activism. We find the provision principally in loans, not bonds, and provide evidence linking adoption of the provision to hedge fund activism. Further, controlling for...