Material adverse change (MAC) clauses are a ubiquitous feature of acquisitions and exhibit substantial cross-sectional variation in the number and types of events that are excluded from being material adverse events (MAEs). MAEs are the underlying cause of 69% ofacquisition terminations and 80% of renegotiations. These renegotiations lead to substantial changes in the price offered to target shareholders. Acquisitions with fewer MAE exclusions are characterized by wider arbitrage spreads during the acquisition period and are associated with higher offer premiums. We conclude that MAC clauses have an economically important impact on the dynamics of corporate acquisitions.

This paper provides a new explanation for why closed-end bond funds coexist along with otherwise identical open-end bond funds. Closed-end bond funds offer investors the opportunity to leverage their fixed income investment at very low borrowing rates and are attractive to investors for this reason. We find that differences in leverage are reflected in the discount on closed-end bond funds in a manner consistent with the advantage of leverage.

We identify large discontinuous changes, known as jumps, in daily stock prices and explore the role of jumps in cross-sectional stock return predictability. Our results show that small and illiquid stocks have higher jump returns to the extent that cross-sectional differences in jumps fully account for the size and illiquidity effects. Based on value-weighted portfolios, jumps also account for the value premium. On the other hand, jumps are not the cause of momentum or net share issue effects. The findings of our study shed new light on stock return dynamics and present challenges to conventional explanations of stock return predictability.

The trading of securities on multiple markets raises the question of each market’s share in the discovery of the informationally efficient price. We exploit salient distributional features of multivariate financial price processes to uniquely determine these contributions, thereby resolving the main drawback of the widely used Hasbrouck (1995) methodology, which merely provides upper and lower bounds of a market’s information share. We show how tail dependence of price changes, which may emerge as a result of differences in market design, can be exploited to estimate unique information shares. Two empiricalapplications illustrate the practical use of the new methodology.