I develop and test the hypothesis that young venture capital firms take companies pubic earlier than older venture capital firms in order to establish a reputation and successfully raise capital for new funds. Evidence from a sample of 433 IPOs suggests that companies backed by young venture capital firms are younger and more underpriced at their IPO than those of established venture capital firms. Moreover, young venture capital firms have been on the board of directors a shorter period of time at the IPO, hold smaller equity stakes, and time the IPO to precede or coincide with raising money for follow-on funds.

We investigate factors affecting the number of outside directorships held by CEOs. CEOs of firms with growth opportunities hold fewer outside directorships than CEOs of firms consisting primarily of assets-in-place. We find evidence consistent with CEOs holding more outside directorships as they transfer decision rights to their eventual successors. We also find that when employees (not necessarily CEOs) of two different firms sit on each other's boards, CEOs hold more outside directorships, suggesting CEO participation bonds the relationship between the two firms. We find little evidence that outside directorships represent unchecked perquisite consumption on the part of CEOs.

This paper examines the relation between the replacement of mutual fund managers and their prior performance. Using the growth rate in a fund's asset base and its portfolio returns as two separate measures of performance, I document an inverse relation between the probability of managerial replacement and fund performance. The sample of departing fund managers exhibits higher portfolio turnover rates and higher expenses relative to an objective-matched sample of nonreplaced fund managers. The overall evidence is consistent with the presence of well-functioning internal and external market mechanisms for mutual fund managers

We examine the evidence that expected security returns can be forecasted by the term premium, default premium, and dividend yield, in light of recent findings that similar security return patterns are associated with Federal Reserve monetary policy developments. We extend Fama and French's (1989) analysis by suggesting that the monetary environment influences investors' required returns, and hence the robustness of the models they propose. Our findings indicate that Fama and French's results vary dramatically across monetary environments; that is, the behavior of the business-conditions proxies and their influence on expected security returns is significantly affected by the monetary sector.

This paper examines the correlation between the returns on individual stocks and the yield changes of individual bonds issued by the same firm, and finds that they are negatively and contemporaneously correlated. This suggests that individual stocks and bonds are driven by firm-specific information that is predominantly related to the mean, rather than the variance, of the firm's underlying assets. Furthermore, I find that lagged stock returns have explanatory power for current bond yield changes, while current stock returns are unrelated to lagged bond yield changes. This shows that stocks lead bonds in reflecting firm-specific information

We report that 34% of targets of unsuccessful control contents between 1983 and 1989 experience a change in top manager within two years following the contest. Management turnover is concentrated among poorly performing firms in which outside blockholders acquire an ownership stake. These blockholders appear to facilitate post-contest asset restructurings that increase the value of the target and improve operating performance. In the absence of an outsider blockholder, managers typically retain their positions despite poor pre-contest performance and the use of value-reducing defensive tactics during the control contest. We conclude that monitoring by active outside investors facilitates valuable internal control efforts.

This paper re-examines the efficiency of foreign currency futures markets by evaluating the role of time-varying risk premia and volatility in explaining technical trading rule profits. The results show that large parts of the technical rule profits can be explained by the time-varying risk premia estimated from a general model for the conditional CAPM; The bootstrap distributions for the profits under the null model average one-third to one-half of the actual profits and enclose the actual profits well within the 90% confidence intervals. Time-varying conditional volatility explains an additional 10% of the profits

Stock splits should have no effect on firm value in perfect capital markets, yet stock prices increase on split announcements. The two traditional explanations are information signaling and improved liquidity for shares that trade at lower prices. We investigate these explanations by studying splits of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) that are not associated with splits in their home-country stock, and which represent unique illustrations of the effect of liquidity. We interpret our findings as supportive of the liquidity explanation of stock split announcement effects.

We examine the accounting and market performance of reverse leveraged buyouts (i.e., firms making their first public offering after previously completing a leveraged buyout). On average, the accounting performance of these firms is significantly better than their industries at the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and for at least the following four years, though there is some evidence of a decline in performance. Cross-sectional variation in accounting performance subsequent to the IPO is related to changes in the equity ownership of both operating management and other insiders, and is unrelated to changes in leverage. Finally, there is no evidence of abnormal common stock performance after the reverse leveraged buyout.

We study the signaling content of managers' dividend decisions for 145 NYSE firms whose annual earnings decline after nine or more consecutive years of growth. Using a variety of model specifications and definitions of favorable dividend signals, we find virtually no support for the notion that dividend decisions help identify firms with superior future earnings. Dividends tend not to be reliable signals because (i) a behavioral bias (overoptimism) leads managers to overestimate future earnings when growth prospects fade; and (ii) managers make only modest cash commitments when they increase dividends, undermining the reliability of such signals.