This article surveys the influence of research journals on finance doctoral education. Influence is measured by citations from syllabi of finance seminars. A sample of 101 distinct syllabi submitted by thirty-three finance doctoral programs yields a list of 1,031 articles cited by at least two schools. These 1,031 articles generate 3,273 citations referencing seventeen finance, economics, and accounting journals, where multiple citations from a single school are counted as a single citation. The most notable findings are the wide variety of seminar content across finance doctoral programs and the dominance of five finance journals in providing this diverse content.

Based on a textual analysis of initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses, we obtain a number of important findings regarding the relation between the conservatism in prospectuses, IPO pricing, and subsequent operating and stock return performance. First, prospectus conservatism is positively related to underpricing, with the relation more pronounced for technology than nontechnology firms. Second, for nontechnology IPOs, prospectus conservatism is able to predict the firm’s post-IPO operating performance. Specifically, we find that conservatism is inversely related to the firm’s operating performance for the 3 years following the IPO. However, this predictability is limited to nontechnology IPOs. Finally, we find some evidence that for nontechnology IPOs conservatism is inversely related to the firm’s post-IPO abnormal stock return. We conclude that the conservatism contained in an IPO’s prospectus contains useful information about pricing and subsequent operating and stock return performance. Moreover, prospectus conservatism for nontechnology IPOs deserves more attention from investors.

This study examines the effect of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) on mergers and acquisitions using a newly constructed CFO Influence Index. Because the perceived influence of CFOs is high in U.K. firms, we use that market for our analysis. We find that influential CFOs as measured by experience, stature, and pay are associated with more deal completions and the pursuit of smaller, domestic targets. High influence CFOs require less time to complete a deal and are able to identify higher quality targets for which they pay less. We also discover that firms with high influence CFOs enjoy greater long-term operating and financial performance post-merger. We conclude that influential CFOs are effective in creating shareholder value during M&A.

This article surveys the influence of research journals on finance doctoral education. Influence is measured by citations from syllabi of finance seminars. A sample of 101 distinct syllabi submitted by 33 finance doctoral programs yields a list of 1,031 articles cited by at least two schools. These 1,031 articles generate 3,273 citations referencing 17 finance, economics, and accounting journals, where multiple citations from a single school are counted as a single citation. The most notable findings are the wide variety of seminar content across finance doctoral programs and the dominance of five finance journals in providing this diverse content.

Recent scandals involving late trading, market timing, and other trading abuses have prompted the SEC to propose changes in the governance of mutual funds. Among these changes are the requirements for an independent chairman and a board consisting of at least 75% independent directors. Using a large sample of mutual fund families for 2002, we find that neither the probability of a fund scandal nor overall fund performance is related to either chair or board independence. Overall, our results question the usefulness of these recently proposed SEC changes in mutual fund governance.

This paper investigates the influence of managerial entrenchment on private placements by examining the firm's decision to appoint representatives of the private investors to the board without shareholder approval. By analyzing a sample of U.S. firms that appoint directors in combination with private offerings between 1995 and 2000, we find that firms with greater managerial entrenchment are more likely to bypass shareholder approval. Firms that bypass shareholders are less likely to appoint independent directors or to elect one of these directors as chairman. We also show that the market reacts more positively to the private offering announcement when the firm submits its board candidates for shareholder approval. Further, firms that bypass approval underperform compared to firms that obtain it. Overall our findings suggest that managers avoid shareholder approval to perpetuate entrenchment.

We examine the persistence of corporate corruption for a sample of privately-held firms from 12 Central and Eastern European countries from 2001 to 2015. Using publicly available information and stochastic frontier analysis, we create a proxy for corporate corruption based on a firm's internal inefficiency. We find that corruption enhances a firm's profitability. A channel analysis further reveals that inflating staff costs is the most common approach by which firms divert funds to finance corruption. In spite of corruption's negative effects on a country's economy, we conclude that it persists because of its ability to improve corporate profitability. We refer to this effect as the Corporate Advantage Hypothesis.