This paper investigates empirically how the value of publicly traded firms is affected by arrangements that protect management from removal. Staggered boards, which a majority of U.S. public companies have, substantially insulate boards from removal in either a hostile takeover or a proxy contest. We find that staggered boards are associated with an economically meaningful reduction in firm value (as measured by Tobin's Q). We also provide suggestive evidence that staggered boards bring about, and not merely reflect, a reduced firm value. Finally, we show that the correlation with reduced firm value is stronger for staggered boards that are established in the corporate charter (which shareholders cannot amend) than for staggered boards established in the company's bylaws (which shareholders can amend).

We provide novel evidence suggestive of insider trading through concealed relationships identified using information from over 100,000 Facebook profiles and their 35 million friends. Focusing on connections between fund managers and firm officers, we demonstrate that hidden ties are linked to substantial abnormal returns averaging 135 basis points per month (exceeding 16% alpha annually, t -stat = 3.54) across the universe of mutual funds and public firms. These hidden ties emerge as the most powerful predictor of future stock returns among documented network characteristics, with predictive power increasing over time through the present day. The premium associated with such connections arises not from endogenous selection or familiarity bias; instead, fund managers exhibit specific timing ability in deciding when to hold (or avoid) stocks of firm officers linked through hidden ties. The value of trading information rises with the degree of concealment and is concentrated around earnings and M&A events. The premium is absent in index funds, where strategic stock selection and timing are infeasible. Our findings on the value of hidden ties remain robust across industries, investment styles, time periods, and firm types.

Cohen and Wang (2013) (CW2013) provide evidence consistent with market participants perceiving staggered boards to be value reducing. Amihud and Stoyanov (2016) (AS2016) contests these findings, reporting some specifications under which the results are not statistically significant. We show that the results retain their significance under a wide array of robustness tests that address the concerns expressed by AS2016. Our empirical findings reinforce the conclusions of CW2013.

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court rulings—separated by several weeks and going in opposite directions—that affected the antitakeover force of SBs. We contribute to the long-standing debate on staggered boards by presenting empirical evidence consistent with the market viewing SBs as leading to lower firm value for the affected firms.

We study the profitability of traders in two fully electronic and highly liquid markets: the Dow and Standard & Poor׳s 500 e-mini futures markets. Using unique information that identify counterparties to a transaction, we show and seek to explain the fact that the network pattern of trades captures the relations between behavior in the market and returns. Our approach includes a simple representation of how much a shock is amplified by the network and how widely it is transmitted. This representation provides a possible shorthand for understanding the consequences of a fat-finger trade, a withdrawing of liquidity, or other market shock.

We exploit a novel setting in which the same piece of information affects two sets of firms: one set of firms requires straightforward processing to update prices, while the other set requires more complicated analyses to incorporate the same piece of information into prices. We document substantial return predictability from the set of easy-to-analyze firms to their more complicated peers. Specifically, a simple portfolio strategy that takes advantage of this straightforward vs. complicated information processing classification yields returns of 118 basis points per month before transaction costs. Consistent with processing complexity driving the return relation, we further show that the more complicated the firm, the more pronounced the return predictability. In addition, we find that sell-side analysts are subject to these same information processing constraints, as their forecast revisions of easy-to-analyze firms predict their future revisions of more complicated firms.

A large body of literature suggests that firm-level stock prices “underreact” to news about future cash flows; i.e., shocks to a firm's expected cash flows are positively correlated with shocks to expected returns on its stock. We examine the joint behavior of returns, cash-flow news, and trading between individuals and institutions. Institutions buy shares from (sell shares to) individuals in response to positive (negative) cash-flow news, thus exploiting the underreaction phenomenon. Institutions are not simply following price momentum strategies: When price goes up (down) in the absence of any cash-flow news, institutions sell shares to (buy shares from) individuals. Although institutions are trading in the “right” direction, institutions as a group outperform individuals by only 1.44% per annum before transaction and other costs, because they are extremely conservative in deviating from the value-weighted market index.

The correlation between governance indices and abnormal returns documented for 1990–1999 subsequently disappeared. The correlation and its disappearance are both due to market participants' gradually learning to appreciate the difference between good-governance and poor-governance firms. Consistent with learning, the correlation's disappearance was associated with increases in market participants' attention to governance; market participants and security analysts were, until the beginning of the 2000s but not subsequently, more positively surprised by the earning announcements of good-governance firms; and, although governance indices no longer generated abnormal returns during the 2000s, their negative association with firm value and operating performance persisted.

We demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected, impact on stock prices. Exploiting the voting record of legislators whose constituents are the affected industries, we show that the votes of these “interested” legislators capture important information seemingly ignored by the market. A long-short portfolio based on these legislators' views earns abnormal returns of over 90 basis points per month following the passage of legislation. Industries that we classify as beneficiaries of legislation experience significantly more positive earnings surprises and positive analyst revisions in the months following passage of the bill, as well as significantly higher future sales and profitability. We show that the more complex the legislation, the more difficulty the market has in assessing the impact of these bills. Further, the more concentrated the legislator's interest in the industry, the more informative are her votes for future returns.

We examine how consumer credit affects entrepreneurship by linking three million earnings and pass-through tax records to credit reports. In the cross-section, we show that self-employment without employees and employer firm ownership increase monotonically with credit limits and credit scores. We then isolate individuals who have had discrete increases in credit limits after the exogenous removal of bankruptcy flags to measure the effects of personal credit on entrepreneurship. Following bankruptcy flag removal, individuals are more likely to start a new employer business and borrow extensively. Those who own businesses with employees borrow $40,000 more after bankruptcy flag removal, a 33% gain relative to the sample average.