Did I Tell You About This Deal? Information Bundling of Acquisition and Earnings News, with Laurence Daures and Sumingyue Wang, Journal of Banking and Finance (2026), forthcoming.

• Announcing M&A deals during earnings calls is an attempt to deflect attention from weak earnings. 

Horizontal directors and investment efficiency, with Sumingyue Wang and Liang Xu, Journal of Corporate Finance 101 (2026), 103057.

• Horizontal directors, who sit on the boards of other firms in the same industry, reduce investment inefficiency, especially over-investment. 

Digitalization and the performance of non-technological firms: Evidence from the COVID-19 and natural disaster shocks, with Sumingyue Wang and Liang Xu, Journal of Corporate Finance 89 (2024), 102670.

• Non-technological firms with more digitalized operations are more resilient to shocks. This effect is reinforced when their suppliers also exhibit higher digital intensity.

Fund Managers Under Pressure: Rationale and Determinants of Secondary Buyouts, with Sridhar Arcot, Zsuzsanna Fluck, and Ulrich Hege, Journal of Financial Economics 115 (2015), 102-135.

• PE funds that are under pressure to use their dry powder (or to initiate fundraising for a new fund) resort more often to Secondary Buyouts. Pressured buyers pay higher prices in SBOs, while pressured sellers sell for lower prices.

The Performance of French LBOs: New data and new results, Revue Finance 33 (2012), 7-60. 

• • French LBO targets outperform similar matched firms. Nevertheless, this positive average hides substantial cross sectional variation: some deals perform very strongly, while one-third of the firms underperform. 

 Payout Policy Choices and Shareholder Investment Horizons, with Massimo Massa, Pedro Matos, Rajdeep Patgiri, and Zahid Rehman, Review of Finance 17 (2012), 261-320.

• • Short-term investors strongly prefer repurchases as a payout method. As a result, the signaling value of such repurchases is significantly discounted by the market.

The Role of Commonality between CEO and Divisional Managers in Internal Capital Markets, with Massimo Massa, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 46 (2011), 841–869.

• Divisonal managers in conglomerates receive more investment when they have social and educational connections to the CEO. Conglomerates with more intra-firm connections exhibit higher diversification discounts.

Shareholder investment horizons: Causes, consequences and implications for managerial practice (invited article, in French), Revue Française de Gestion 198-199 (2009), 77-93. 

• • A survey of the empirical literature, and corresponding theoretical mechanisms, on the causes and consequences of short-termism in shareholder horizons. 

Local ownership as private information: evidence on the liquidity-monitoring trade-off, with Massimo Massa, Journal of Financial Economics 83 (2007), 751-792.

• Ownership by informed investors affects prices in opposite directions: their monitoring  increases stock prices, but the lower liquidity induced by their presence reduces stock prices. This helps explain why ownership seems to be unrelated to performance. 

Idiosyncratic volatility and product market competition, with Massimo Massa, Journal of Business 79 (2006), 3125-3152.

• Market power is a natural hedge against cost shocks, while also contributing to higher investor visibility (lower information uncertainty). Hence, higher competition leads to higher idiosyncratic volatility.

Favoritism in mutual funds families? evidence on strategic cross-fund subsidization, with Massimo Massa and Pedro Matos, Journal of Finance 61 (2006), 73-104.

• Mutual fund families strategically transfer performance across their funds to maximize family profits, in response to explicit (fees) or implicit (flow-performance) incentives. Allocations of underpriced IPOs and opposite trades across funds seem to be two of the ways in which such favoritism occurs. 

Shareholder investment horizons and the market for corporate control, with Massimo Massa and Pedro Matos, Journal of Financial Economics 76 (2005), 135-165.

• Firms dominated by short-term oriented shareholders are more likely to receive a takeover offer but receive a lower premium. Simultaneously, such firms, when they acquire, make worse deals. Short-term shareholders  lubricate the market for corporate control at the expense of bargaining power and of monitoring inside their firms.