We study the impact of gender diversity in corporate boards on firm value by exploiting a natural experiment setting in India where the government mandated firms to appoint at least one female director on their boards. We find a significantly positive market reaction when firms comply with the mandate but only when they appoint qualified female directors who are not related to promoters. Moreover, market reward is higher for firms headquartered in states with severe gender bias. We show how regulatory intervention mitigates frictions related to gender bias to improve firm value through greater gender diversity when firms respond appropriately.

We study the effect of cultural and institutional distances on the probability that a firm from an acquiring country announces an acquisition of a firm in a target country (initiation), the probability that an announced deal is completed (completion), and the average time it takes to complete an acquisition (duration). We find that culture plays a decisive role in deal initiation. Completion and duration of a deal is largely unaffected by the cross country cultural and institutional differences and depends on deal level characteristics. We find a higher probability for acquirers to hire Top-tier advisors when they initiate deals in countries with higher cultural differences. We also find that use of Top-tier advisors by acquirers increases the probability of completion of the deal.

We use board structure changes brought by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX; 2002) and subsequent listing standards as a natural experiment to investigate if founding families are expropriators or stewards of shareholder value. We hypothesize gain in a firm's value post-SOX if founding families are expropriators and a value loss if they are stewards. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that family firms that did not meet the requirements of SOX-related, board independence provisions before 2002, suffered significant value loss post-SOX. Our results favor the steward role for founding families.

We study overconfidence related to financial knowledge among men and women within U.S. households, venturing beyond prior research confined to subsamples such as CEOs, retail investors, and older adults. By expanding our study to the broader U.S. population, we provide evidence that women, on average, exhibit greater overconfidence than men – a discrepancy attributable to the gender difference in financial knowledge. We find a positive association between overconfidence and both investment risk-taking and savings behavior, while it correlates inversely with prudent credit card management. Our findings emphasize the instrumental role of financial literacy in mitigating overconfidence, providing a deeper understanding of the interaction between gender, overconfidence, and financial literacy. Our results carry profound implications for policy interventions and educational strategies.

We use our survey of finance professors from universities across the USA to investigate whether men and women react differently to prior gains and losses. We find that after incurring a loss, a large fraction of men continue to invest in stocks, but a majority of women tend to avoid investing in stocks. Even though prior losses increase the expectation of unfavorable market conditions, we find that women are more likely than men to expect unfavorable market conditions irrespective of whether they have made a gain or a loss in their prior stock market investments.

Effective board monitoring prevents entrenched managers from undertaking acquisitions that are detrimental to shareholders. It also facilitates a smooth transition during the post-acquisition phase. We examine how independent board leadership affects M&A outcomes. Controlling for many firm, board, and CEO attributes, we find that acquirers with independent board chairpersons earn significantly higher CAR around M&A announcements. The positive effects of independent board chairpersons are more pronounced in acquirers with high monitoring needs. The boards led by independent chairpersons primarily add value by selecting targets with high synergetic gains, avoiding overpaying for targets, and facilitating smooth transition in the post-acquisition phase.

We identify the first and subsequent acquisitions made by U.S. firms that conduct multiple cross-border acquisitions and provide robust evidence that shareholders realize a statistically significant three-day cumulative abnormal return (CAR) of 1% around the announcement of their first international acquisition. The CAR for the first acquisition is significantly higher than the CAR around the announcement of subsequent cross-border acquisitions and is unique to cross-border acquisitions. Our findings indicate that shareholders of U.S. firms attach a premium to the firm's initial effort to globalize via international acquisitions.

We resolve the asymmetric price response puzzle for additions to and deletions from the S&P 500 documented in Chen, Noronha, and Singal (2004) by using a more appropriate methodology to measure abnormal returns and correctly adjusting for outliers. In contrast to their findings, our results show a permanent price response for both additions and deletions. We further distinguish between firms transferred into other S&P indices and true additions/deletions (firms not added from or placed into other S&P indices). We find a permanent price increase for true additions and a permanent decline in price for true deletions from the S&P 500.