Kenneth A. Borokhovich

Variation in the Monitoring Incentives of Outside Stockholders

We examine abnormal returns around the announcement of antitakeover amendment proposals for evidence on variation in the effectiveness of monitoring by outside stockholders. The evidence suggests that the market views large stockholders who are outsiders but have potential business ties to a firm (affiliated blockholders) as less effective monitors than other outside blockholders (unaffiliated blockholders). Abnormal returns tend to be lower at firms where holdings of affiliated blockholders exceed holdings of unaffiliated blockholders than at firms where the reverse is true. The difference in the stock ownership of these two classes of blockholders explains more of the variation in abnormal returns than factors such as management stock ownership and board composition. The evidence for affiliated and unaffiliated blockholders is consistent when we focus on the relation between abnormal returns and institutional ownership. No evidence is found of systematic variation in the effectiveness of monitoring by institutional stockholders who are not blockholders.

An Analysis of Finance Journal Impact Factors

This paper provides an analysis of the citation counts of articles published in the leading finance journals. It identifies the determinants of the most prevalent measure of influence for finance journals, the Social Sciences Citation Index impact factors. It finds that impact factors are affected by citations outside the finance field, are not affected by the distribution of published articles across subfields, and are good predictors of the long-term citation counts of articles. The citation impact factors are reduced for both the Journal of Financial Economics and The Journal of Finance by their publication of other than regular articles. Copyright The American Finance Association 2000.

The Importance of Board Quality in the Event of a CEO Death

We examine board quality and executive replacement decisions around deaths of senior executives. Stock price reactions to executive deaths are positively related to board independence. Controlling for such factors as the deceaseds stockholdings, outside blockholdings, board size, and whether the deceased was a founder, board independence is the most significant factor explaining abnormal returns. Board independence is particularly important when there is no apparent successor and firm performance is poor. The results are consistent with independent boards being reluctant to discipline poorly performing incumbent managers, but nevertheless using the opportunity of an executive death to improve the quality of management.

Financial Management (1972-1994): A Retrospective

Financial Management has published more than 800 papers from 1972 through 1994. This article documents the influence of FM on financial research, financial education, and financial practice. The evolution of subject coverage over time is discussed . The FM articles most cited in journals and text books are identified. FM ranks near the top of finance journals in every criterion examined.

Journal influence in corporate research

Purpose - – Studies of research influence commonly look at the overall field of finance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the sub-field of corporate finance at four different points in time to determine its evolution and range of influence, specifically focussing on the relative influence of seven leading journals. Design/methodology/approach - – Not all articles appearing in the set of journals are in corporate finance. The authors examine each article published in the journals for four key periods and identify those that are corporate. The impact factors (IFs) published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are for all articles appearing in a journal. The authors are interested only in the corporate articles, so the authors calculate separate corporate IFs based on the citations to the corporate articles using the JCR technique. Findings - – The authors find a broad corporate research environment with influence that extends well beyond finance. The authors also find differences in the relative influence of the journals not only in their total influence, but in where the influence occurs outside finance and other business journals and even more broadly in the social sciences. Research limitations/implications - – The exclusion of journals outside the seven selected may not uncover other areas where corporate finance articles impact research more broadly. Also, classification of articles is inherently subjective. Practical implications - – The authors draw comparisons between journals and corporate finance topic areas; indicating the breadth and depth research in these areas attain. These results should prove beneficial to researchers in determining areas of influence for their work, consequently providing opportunities for additional exchanges of ideas resulting in better and more informed research in the overall social sciences. Further, our approach to analyzing journal influence could prove fruitful for additional research. Originality/value - – The findings allow for a greater understanding of the influence of individual journals and their subsequent rankings by a number of different means. The authors propose that the means and measures employed here can lead to a greater understanding of how influential a journal really is. Further, the authors contend that the study provides comparisons of the scope and depth of influence for each journal in a way that could lead to new avenues of research.