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.

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.

We examine S&P 500 firms over 1999–2014 that characterize their annual performance with extreme positive language. Only 18% of such firms increase shareholder value, while over 80% have either negative or insignificant abnormal returns. Our evidence suggests that firms often base their claims of extreme positive performance on high raw returns or strong relative accounting performance. In comparison to firms that generate positive abnormal returns without boasting, our sample firms tend to have superior accounting performance. We conclude that boasting about performance is rarely associated with value creation and is more consistent with an emphasis on accounting metrics.