Existing theory suggests that, in an unregulated market for corporate control, the level of takeovers is suboptimal because shareholders do not receive the full benefit from them.However, existing theory neglects that the threat of takeover may divert managerial effort from productive to defensive activities.This paper shows that, when this is considered, takeovers may, in fact, be excessive.I.

Lender–borrower relationships facilitate monitoring in small business loans. We investigate how the duration and scope of the bank–borrower relationship affect the decision to secure line-of-credit and nonline-of-credit loans. We find that the likelihood of collateralizing a line of credit decreases with the length of the bank–borrower relationship. For nonline-of-credit loans, however, the incidence of collateral pledge decreases with the number of lender-provided financial services used by the borrower. Our finding indicates that the mechanism through which banks obtain private information depends on the type of the loan. Pooling across loan types may dilute the impact of both the duration and scope on the terms of a loan.

We test the hypothesis that managers who face a high termination risk make less risky investments than the managers who face a low termination risk. A 10% increase in our measure of termination risk is associated with a 5%–23% decline in stock returns volatility for the median firm in our sample. We also find that for CEOs who are more likely to be fired in the event of investment failure, the inhibiting effect of termination risk appears to offset the positive effect of convexity of managerial compensation on managerial risk taking. These results are robust to alternative definitions of forced turnover and various measures of firm performances.