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This article provides new evidence on the important role of institutional investors in affecting corporate strategy. Institutional cross-ownership between two firms not only increases the probability of them merging, but also affects the outcomes of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Institutional cross-ownership reduces deal premiums, increases stock payment in M&A transactions, and lowers the completion probabilities of deals with negative acquirer announcement returns. Furthermore, deals with high institutional crossownership have lower transaction costs and disclose more transparent financial statement information. The effect of cross-ownership on the total deal synergies and post-deal longterm performance is positive, which can be attributed to independent and non-transient cross-owners. Our findings are robust after mitigating the cross-ownership asymmetry concern. Overall, our results suggest that the growth of institutional cross-holdings in U.S. stock markets may greatly change corporate strategies and decision-making processes.

This paper examines whether the motivation of institutional investors in monitoring a firm is positively related to the relative importance of the firm's stock in their portfolios. We find that greater motivated monitoring institutional ownership is associated with a higher marginal value of corporate cash holdings, which cannot be explained by other corporate governance measures and institution types. Further, we find that the economic effect of institutional monitoring on the marginal value of cash falls with decreasing institutions' monitoring motivation. Based on these findings, we construct a monitoring motivation-weighted institutional ownership measure and document a positive relation between it and the marginal value of cash. Our results are robust after controlling for the endogeneity of institutional ownership, three cash regimes, firm size, and changes in US public firms over time.

We study the effect of limited access to capital on firm cost stickiness, using data from a large sample of Chinese private firms over 1998-2007. Our results show that on average SG&A costs are anti-sticky. For firms in regions with lower levels of financial development, SG&A costs have lower sensitivity to sales increases and exhibit lower stickiness. Overall our findings suggest access to capital as an important determinant of cost stickiness.

We find that motivated monitoring by institutional investors mitigates firm investment inefficiency, estimated by Richardson's (2006) approach. This relation is robust when using the annual reconstitution of the Russell indexes as exogenous shocks to institutional ownership during the period 1995–2015 and after classifying institutional ownership by institution type. We also show that closer monitoring mitigates the problem of both over‐investing free cash flows and under‐investment due to managers’ career concerns. Finally, we document that the effectiveness of the monitoring by institutional investors appears to increase monotonically with respect to the firm's relative importance in their portfolios.

Using a sample of 1,369 cross‐border acquisitions announced by Standard & Poor's 1500 firms between 2000 and 2014, we find strong evidence that derivatives users experience higher announcement returns than non‐users, which translates into a US$ 193.7 million shareholder gain for an average‐sized acquirer. In addition, we find that acquirers with hedging programmes have higher deal completion probabilities, longer deal completion times, and better long‐term post‐deal performance. We confirm our findings after employing an extensive array of models to address potential endogeneity. Overall, our results provide new insights into a link between corporate financial hedging and firm performance.

We find that motivated monitoring by institutional investors mitigates firm investment inefficiency, estimated by Richardson's (2006) approach. This relation is robust when using the annual reconstitution of the Russell indexes as exogenous shocks to institutional ownership during the period 1995-2015 and after classifying institutional ownership by institution type. We also show that closer monitoring mitigates the problem of both over-investing free cash flows and under-investment due to managers' career concerns. Finally, we document that the effectiveness of the monitoring by institutional investors appears to increase monotonically with respect to the firm's relative importance in their portfolios.

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