We study the market for CEO talent in public U.S. firms during the years 1993-2005. CEO talent pools are not homogenous across firms and industries. About 68% of new CEOs are former employees of their own firms (“insider CEOsâ€) and the rest come from outside the firm (“outsider...

We use a unique database on the ownership stakes and compensation of equity mutual fund directors to analyze whether the directors' incentive structure is related to fund performance. We find that governance plays an economically substantial and statistically significant role. The ownership...

The idea that uncertainty about a firm’s long-run profitability could increase its stock valuation has been proposed by Pastor and Veronesi (2003) to explain a number of phenomena in financial markets. We further examine this idea by analyzing a simple valuation model for both stocks and...

This paper considers the impact of takeover (or acquisition) likelihood on firm valuation. If firms are more likely to acquire during times when they have free cash and/or when the required rate of return is low, takeover targets become more sensitive to shocks to aggregate cash flows and/or to...

This study looks inside a large retail-banking group to understand how influence within the group affects internal capital allocations and lending behavior at the member bank level. The group consists of 181 member banks that jointly own a headquarters. Influence is measured by the divergence...

This paper examines the effect of institutional investors? investment duration on the efficiency of stock prices. Using a new duration measure based on quarterly institutional investors? portfolio holdings, the presence of short-term institutional investors can help explain many of the...

This paper examines the impact on shareholder voting of the mutual fund voting disclosure regulation adopted by the SEC in 2003, using a paired sample of proposals submitted before and after the rule change. We focus on how voting outcomes relate to institutional ownership and the voting...

We investigate the effects of shareholder governance mechanisms on bondholders and document two new findings. First, the impact of shareholder control (proxied by large institutional blockholders) on credit risk depends on takeover vulnerability. Shareholder control is associated with higher...

his paper introduces a dataset tracking approximately 1,000 firms’ G- and E-index scores, as well the individual corporate governance provisions constituting these indexes, over the 1978-1989 period. Combining this data with the 1990-2006 IRRC data, we are able to track firms’...

This paper studies the interaction between takeover defenses and product market competition. We find that firms in more competitive industries have more takeover defenses. This is the opposite result from what one would expect if takeover defenses always constitute an inefficient outcome that...