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We study managerial style effects in a large panel of Compustat firms from 1990 to 2007. We find that policy changes after exogenous CEO departures do not display abnormally high levels of variability, casting doubt on the hypothesis that unanticipated idiosyncratic managerial style effects have a substantive impact on corporate policies. For endogenous CEO departures, we detect abnormally large policy changes after forced CEO turnover. These changes are larger in firms that are likely to draw from a deeper pool of replacement CEO candidates based on the firm's geographic location. This evidence is consistent with the presence of casual style effects that are fully anticipated by the board when choosing a new leader. In contrast to prior work, managers in our sample do not appear to adopt a common relative-to-firm style bias across multiple employers. We also offer cautionary evidence on the use of standard F-tests to detect style effects.

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We assemble a sample of over 10,000 customer-supplier relationships and determine whether the customer owns equity in the supplier. We find that factors related to both contractual incompleteness and financial market frictions are important in the decision of a customer firm to take an equity stake in their supplier. Evidence on the variation in the size of observed equity positions suggests that there are limits to the size of optimal ownership stakes in many relationships. Finally, we find that relationships accompanied by equity ownership last significantly longer than other relationships, suggesting that ownership aids in bonding trading parties together. Copyright 2006 by The American Finance Association.

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