Determining whether diversification adds or destroys value is notoriously difficult, leaving open the question of the degree to which any diversification discount can be affected by management quality and oversight. This study uses the unique setting of real estate investment trusts (REITs), which can diversify over property types as well as locations, to examine this issue. We find that REITs that diversify by investing in more locations tend to be valued lower than REITs with a tighter geographical focus. More importantly, our results suggest that the diversification discount is lower for firms with more institutional ownership, especially institutional types that tend to be more active monitors.

Regulatory pressure to increase both audit committee financial expertise and board independence has resulted in lower status for audit committees relative to management. This status differential is relevant because expertise and relative status are important determinants of each party׳s ability to influence outcomes, particularly when parties face conflicting goals. We find that audit committees with both financial expertise and high relative status are associated with lower levels of earnings management, as measured by accounting irregularities and abnormal accruals. These results speak to benefits and limitations of financial expertise, which have been the focus of considerable debate.

Golden parachutes (GPs) have attracted substantial attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. We find that GPs are associated with higher expected acquisition premiums and that this association is at least partly due to the effect of GPs on executive incentives. However, we also find that firms that adopt GPs experience negative abnormal stock returns both during and subsequent to the period surrounding their adoption. This finding raises the possibility that even though GPs facilitate some value-increasing acquisitions, they do have, on average, an overall negative effect on shareholder wealth; this effect could be due to GPs weakening the force of the market for control and thereby increasing managerial slack, and/or to GPs making it attractive for executives to go along with some value-decreasing acquisitions that do not serve shareholders' long-term interests. Our findings have significant implications for ongoing debates on GPs and suggest the need for additional work identifying the types of GPs that drive the identified correlation between GPs and reduced shareholder value.

We model the impact of public and private ownership structures on firms' incentives to invest in innovative projects. We show that it is optimal to go public when exploiting existing ideas and optimal to go private when exploring new ideas. This result derives from the fact that private firms are less transparent to outside investors than are public firms. In private firms, insiders can time the market by choosing an early exit strategy if they receive bad news. This option makes insiders more tolerant of failures and thus more inclined to invest in innovative projects. In contrast, the prices of publicly traded securities react quickly to good news, providing insiders with incentives to choose conventional projects and cash in early.

Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labor income shocks. This article brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The driver of such inversion in the life-cycle profile is the resolution of uncertainty regarding social security pension, which increases the investor’s risk appetite. This occurs if a small positive contemporaneous correlation between permanent labor income shocks and stock returns is matched by a realistically high degree of risk aversion. Absent this combination, the typical downward-sloping profile obtains. Overlooking differences in optimal investment profiles across heterogeneous workers results in large welfare losses, in the order of 15–30% of lifetime consumption.

For a sample of convertible bonds issued during the period 1980 through 2002, we empirically investigate the determinants of call policy. We find that the risk of a failed call over the call notice period helps explain why firms call only after conversion value exceeds call price by a substantial safety premium. We find strong evidence that cash flow considerations and a desire to mitigate agency conflicts influence call policy. We also find evidence that the decision to issue and subsequently call a convertible bond is influenced by a desire to obtain backdoor equity financing and to finance growth options. There is no evidence, however, that firms with favorable inside information are more likely to delay calls. Finally, we find that a significant portion of calls are associated with restructuring and merger activity, and with bond rating upgrades and downgrades. In these cases, there is little if any call delay.

We examine the consequences of a damaged reputation for fraud firms in the context of product markets. We generate three direct measures of reputational damage and find evidence that customers impose significant reputational sanctions on fraud firms. Using yearly transactional data to track the business dealings of fraud firms with large customers, we show that customer reputational sanctions result in a decline in the firm's operating performance through increased selling costs, as suggested by previous studies of corporate reputation. We further find that reputational losses estimated from an event study approach reflect the actual decrease in the revenue of a fraud firm, which suggests that the event study approach yields a reliable measure of reputational losses. Finally, we document that these findings are the result of a damaged reputation following the detection of fraud rather than an effect of adverse information revealed upon fraud detection.

We examine the influence of corporate governance quality on firms' choice between convertible debt, straight debt, and equity using a Western European sample of security offerings made between 2000 and 2010. We find that weaker firm-specific and country-specific corporate governance quality increases firms' likelihood of issuing convertible debt instead of straight debt and common equity. We also find that stockholder reactions to convertible debt announcements are more favorable for firms with weaker corporate governance. Our results suggest that corporate governance quality is a significant security choice determinant, with firms using convertible debt as a substitute for high quality governance mechanisms.

We find that Nevada, the second most popular state for out-of-state incorporations and a state with lax corporate law, attracts firms that are 30–40% more likely to report financial results that later require restatement than firms incorporated in other states, including Delaware. Our results suggest that firms favoring protections for insiders select Nevada as a corporate home, and these firms are prone to financial reporting failures. We provide some evidence that Nevada law also has a causal impact by increasing a Nevada firm's propensity to misreport financials after the firm has incorporated in Nevada.