We study the value of stock liquidity in the market for corporate control and show that the target firm’s liquidity has an impact on the transaction itself and on the resulting merged entity. We use a sample of U.S. merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions (1987–2007) to show that acquiring a more liquid firm makes the stock of the acquirer more liquid. This has consequences for M&A activity and pricing. Public acquirers are more likely than private acquirers to acquire more liquid targets. Liquidity also translates into a greater likelihood of completing the deal and higher compensation for the target.

Little evidence exists on whether boards help managers make better decisions. We provide evidence that strong and independent boards help overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) avoid honest mistakes when they seek to acquire other companies. In addition, we find that once-overconfident CEOs make better acquisition decisions after they experience personal stock trading losses, providing evidence that a manager’s recent personal experience, and not just educational and early career experience, influences firm investment policy. Finally, we develop and validate a new CEO overconfidence measure that is easily constructed from machine-readable insider trading data, unlike previously used measures.

The large deviation of the actual return of a leveraged exchange-traded fund (LETF) from the leveraged multiple of the underlying index return has drawn considerable attention from investors, regulators, and the financial media. Despite this attention, the sources and fundamental determinants of the LETF return deviation remain unidentified. This study constructs a clear, unified, objective, and executable framework that addresses the behaviors, sources, and determinants of the LETF compounding and noncompounding deviations. Our theoretical predictions and empirical results hold the promise of guiding investors, regulators, financial advisors, and portfolio managers toward a thorough understanding of the return behavior of LETFs.