Publications

24 Feb 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Integrated Reporting and Investor Clientele

Keywords: by George Serafeim; Accounting

Winter 2021
Article

Can Staggered Boards Improve Value? Causal Evidence from Massachusetts

By: Robert Daines, Shelley Xin Li and Charles C.Y. Wang

We study the effect of staggered boards (SBs) using a quasi-experiment: a 1990 law that imposed an SB on all Massachusetts-incorporated firms. The law led to an increase in Tobin's Q, investment in CAPEX and R&D, patents, higher-quality patented innovations, and... View Details

Keywords: Staggered Board; Entrenchment; Life-cycle; Tobin's Q; Innovation; Profitability; Investor Composition; Governing and Advisory Boards; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Institutional Investing; Value

06 Dec 2021
Research & Ideas

The Popular Stock Metric That Can Lead Investors Astray

What if a bedrock method that investors have relied on for decades to find cheap-but-promising stocks to buy low and sell high no longer works well? The book-to-market ratio has been used since at least the Great Depression to identify... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2015
Chapter

Thirty Years of Evolution in the Roles of Institutional Investors in Corporate Governance

By: John C. Coates

This chapter presents evidence that shifts in the composition and roles of institutions have been at least as important, if not more so, than aggregate increases in institutional ownership. Over the past 30 years, institutions have come to play more varied roles in... View Details

June 2009
Journal Article

Taxes, Institutions and Foreign Diversification Opportunities

By: Mihir Desai and Dhammika Dharmapala

Investors can access foreign diversification opportunities through either foreign portfolio investment (FPI) or foreign direct investment (FDI). The worldwide tax regime employed by the U.S. potentially distorts this choice by penalizing FDI, relative to FPI, in... View Details

Keywords: International Finance; Foreign Direct Investment; Investment Portfolio; Multinational Firms and Management; Taxation; Diversification; United States

Working Paper

Index Rebalancing and Stock Market Composition: Do Indexes Time the Market?

By: Marco Sammon and John J. Shim

Value-weighted indexes must rebalance in response to stock market composition changes, e.g., issuance, buybacks, and IPOs. In doing so, existing index funds implicitly engage in market timing. Index funds’ long-short rebalancing portfolios have a -3.5% annual return... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Financial Markets; Market Timing; Investment Return

January 2020 (Revised December 2024)
Case

Governing PG&E

By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz

The five commissioners of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) listened intently at a public forum in April 2019 as PG&E Corporation’s out-going chairman Richard Kelly described the company’s proposed new board. PG&E, which provided electricity and natural... View Details

Educators

Purchase

The consistent growth of long-term alternative asset managers in the past four decades coincided with the secular decline in interest rates. This has been an important tailwind for the private equity industry’s development as debt markets became increasingly... View Details

27 Oct 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Stock Price Fragility

Keywords: by Robin Greenwood & David Thesmar

Research Summary

Board Independence and the Design of Executive Compensation

In this project, I analyze the compensation decisions of boards of directors. Compensation decisions not only serve to motivate executives, but also affect a board's reputation for independence. Although greater managerial influence over the board has the obvious... View Details

2016
Working Paper

Credit-Market Sentiment and the Business Cycle

By: David Lopez-Salido, Jeremy C. Stein and Egon Zakrajsek

Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2013, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t – 2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t and t + 1. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions.... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Credit; Macroeconomics