Business Commons^™

This paper revisits the staggered board debate focusing on the long-term association of firm value with

changes in board structure. We find no evidence that staggered board changes are negatively related to firm

value. However, we find a positive relation for firms engaged in innovation and where stakeholder

relationships matter more. This suggests that staggered boards promote value creation for some firms by

committing the firm to undertaking long-term projects and bonding it to the relationship-specific

investments of its stakeholders. Our results are robust to matching procedures and an exogenous change in

Massachusetts’ corporate law that mandated staggered boards.

We examine the impact of shared auditors, defined as audit firms that provide audit services to a target and its acquirer firm prior to an acquisition, on transaction outcomes. We find shared auditors are observed in nearly a quarter of all public acquisitions and targets are more likely to receive a bid from a firm that has the same auditor. Moreover, these shared auditor deals are associated with significantly lower deal premiums, lower target event returns, higher bidder event returns, and higher deal completion rates. These results are driven by bids in which targets and acquirers share the same practice …