Using a sample of 2198 completed M&A transactions between 1994 and 2010 in which both target and acquirer are public US firms supplemented with hand-collected data for target CEO retention, we uncover a significantly negative relation between target CEO retention and takeover premiums received by target shareholders. Further, when the target CEO was not retained, we document a significantly negative relation between the relative importance of the severance pay received by the target CEO and takeover premium. Taken together, our findings, which hold in various robustness tests, suggest that target CEOs bargain shareholder value for personal benefits during corporate takeovers. Our findings have important policy implications for takeover disclosures.

Using options-implied variance, a forward-looking measure of conditional variance, we revisit the debate on the idiosyncratic risk-return relation. In both cross-sectional (for individual stocks) and time-series (for the market index) regressions, we find a negative relation between options-implied variance and future stock returns. Consistent with Miller’s (1977) divergence of opinion hypothesis, the negative relation gets stronger (1) for stocks with more stringent short-sale constraints or (2) when shorting stocks becomes more difficult. Moreover, the negative correlation of realized idiosyncratic variance or analyst forecast dispersion with future stock returns mainly reflects their close correlation with our conditional idiosyncratic variance measure.

Between 2000 and 2003 a series of disclosure and analyst regulations curbing abusive financial reporting and analyst behavior were enacted to strengthen the information environment of U.S. capital markets. We investigate whether these regulations reduced security mispricing and increased stock market efficiency. After the regulations, we find a significant reduction in short‐term stock price continuation following analyst forecast revisions and earnings announcements. The effect was more pronounced among higher information uncertainty firms, where we expect security valuation to be most sensitive to regulation. Analyst forecast accuracy also improved in these firms, consistent with reduced mispricing being due to an improved corporate information environment following the regulations. Our findings are robust to controls for time trends, trading activity, the financial crisis, analyst coverage, delistings, and changes in information uncertainty proxies. We find no concurrent effect among European firms and a regression discontinuity design supports our identification of a regulatory effect

We find that regulators can implement identical rules inconsistently due to differences in their institutional design and incentives, and this behavior may adversely impact the effectiveness with which regulation is implemented. We study supervisory decisions of U.S. banking regulators and exploit a legally determined rotation policy that assigns federal and state supervisors to the same bank at exogenously set time intervals. Comparing federal and state regulator supervisory ratings within the same bank, we find that federal regulators are systematically tougher, downgrading supervisory ratings almost twice as frequently as do state supervisors. State regulators counteract these downgrades to some degree by upgrading more frequently. Under federal regulators, banks report worse asset quality, higher regulatory capital ratios, and lower return on assets. Leniency of state regulators relative to their federal counterparts is related to costly outcomes, such as higher failure rates and lower repayment rates of government assistance funds. The discrepancy in regulator behavior is related to different weights given by regulators to local economic conditions and, to some extent, differences in regulatory resources. We find no support for regulator self-interest, which includes “revolving doors” as a reason for leniency of state regulators

We evaluate the effect of land use regulation on the value of land and on welfare. Our estimates are based on a decomposition of the effects of regulation into three components: an own-lot effect, which reflects the cost of regulatory constraints to the owner of a parcel; an external effect, which reflects the value of regulatory constraints on one's neighbors; a supply effect, which reflects the effect of regulated scarcity of developable land. Using this decomposition, we arrive at a novel strategy for estimating a plausibly causal effect of land use regulation on land value and welfare. This strategy exploits cross-border changes in development, prices, and regulation in regions near municipal borders. Our estimates suggest large negative effects of regulation on the value of land and welfare in these regions

We propose a labor market model in which agents with heterogenous ability levels choose to work as bankers or as financial regulators. When workers extract intrinsic benefits from working in regulation (such as public-sector motivation or human capital accumulation), our model jointly predicts that bankers are, on average, more skilled than regulators and their compensation is more sensitive to performance. During financial booms, banks draw the best workers away from the regulatory sector and misbehavior increases. In a dynamic extension of our model, young regulators accumulate human capital and the best ones switch to banking in mid-career

In order to incentivize stronger issuer due diligence effort, European and U.S. authorities are amending securitization-related regulations to force issuers to retain an economic interest in the securitization products they issue. This paper contributes to the process by exploring the economics of equity and mezzanine tranche retention in the context of systemic risk, moral hazard, accounting frictions and funding distortions. It shows that loan screening activity is maximized when the loan originating bank retains the equity tranche. However, in case capital structure irrelevance does not hold a profit maximizing bank is likely to favor retention of the less risky mezzanine tranche. From a regulator's perspective this is a problem because the implied loan screening activity is substantially lower in this case. Policy attention is even more warranted if performing due diligence is costly, the economic outlook is positive or loan profitability is high

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India's environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations are associated with substantial improvements in air quality. The most successful air regulation resulted in a modest but statistically insignificant decline in infant mortality. In contrast, the water regulations had no measurable benefits. The available evidence leads us to cautiously conclude that higher demand for air quality prompted the effective enforcement of air pollution regulations, indicating that strong public support allows environmental regulations to succeed in weak institutional settings

We study the impacts of the recently proposed risk retention regulation for asset securitization, i.e. the issuer has to retain a certain proportion of securitized assets. We also consider the frequently discussed measure to require the issuer disclose certain information of the securitized assets. In a dynamic model with asymmetric information between a risk-averse originating bank and a continuum of risk-averse investors, we find that it is impossible for a flat-rate retention requirement to be optimal for all asset types. Although both risk retention and information disclosure regulations are effective in reducing investors’ informational loss, neither can unconditionally enhance social welfare upon the unregulated case. For both measures, there are associated regulatory cost: risk retention regulation aggravates adverse selection problem because it undermines the channel of informational revelation by the choice of securitization intensity, and information disclosure requirement incurs a signalling cost by distorting banks’ securitization intensity in sending signals. Under an appropriate set of conditions we find that information disclosure requirement complements risk retention regulation when investors are sufficiently risk averse

Fragility is affected by how the balance sheet composition of financial intermediaries, the precision of information signals, and market stress parameters all influence the extent of strategic complementarity among investors' strategies. A solvency and a liquidity ratio are required to control the likelihood of insolvency and illiquidity. The solvency requirement must be strengthened in the face of increased competition, whereas the liquidity requirement must be strengthened under more conservative fund managers and higher penalties for fire sales. Greater disclosure may aggravate fragility and require an increase in the liquidity ratio, so regulators should establish prudential and disclosure policies in tandem