Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Abstract. We use an important legal event as a natural experiment to examine the effect of management fiduciary duties on equity‐debt conflicts. A 1991 Delawar...

We describe how managers can entrench themselves by making manager-specific investments that make it costly for shareholders to replace them. By making manager-specific investments. managers can reduce the probability of being replaced extract higher wages and larger perquisites from shareholders. and obtain more latitude in determining corporate strategy. Our model of entrenchment has empirica...

Threshold secret sharing schemes do not prevent any malicious behavior of the dealer or shareholders and so we need verifiable secret sharing, to detect and identify the cheaters, to achieve fair reconstruction of a secret. The problem of verifiable secret sharing is to verify the shares distributed by the dealer. A novel approach for verifiable secret sharing is presented in this paper where b...

Huge amount of capital involved in mergers and acquisition activity has raised the stakes of all the stakeholders involved. From the shareholders, senior management, employees and customers of merging, acquiring and acquired companies to investment banks and other parties involved, everyone anticipates substantial monetary/non monetary returns. Postmerger analysis reports, though, have not been...

We consider the problem of increasing the threshold parameter of a secret-sharing scheme after the setup (share distribution) phase, without further communication between the dealer and the shareholders. Previous solutions to this problem require one to start off with a non-standard scheme designed specifically for this purpose, or to have secure channels between shareholders. In contrast, we s...

We highlight the ex ante risk-shifting incentives faced by a bank’s shareholders/managers when CoCos (contingent convertible capital) are part of the capital structure. The risk shifting incentive arises from the wealth transfers that the shareholders will receive upon the CoCo’s conversion under CoCo designs widely used in practice. Specifically we show that for principal writedown and nondilu...

This paper investigates the political consequences of the broad spread of stock ownership among US households over the past 25 years. Using four cross-sections of the American National Election Study from 1998 to 2004, and a three-wave panel from 2000-2004, we find a consistent positive relationship between stockownership and identifying as a Republican after controlling for obvious confounds. ...