Audra Boone

Audra Boone is an Academic Affiliate with Compass Lexecon. She is a Professor of Finance and holder of the C.R. Williams Professorship in Financial Services in the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University. She is a research member at the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). Professor Boone is also Associate Editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance and has refereed for several top finance and accounting journals.

Previously, Professor Boone served as a senior financial economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) working in the financial intermediaries group of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis. Prior to that she served as a visiting scholar at the SEC to work on litigation and policy issues related to corporate finance and investments. She was an Associate Professor and held the Gina and William H. Flores ’76 Endowed Professorship in Finance in the Department of Finance of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University from 2011 to 2015, served on the faculty at the University of Kansas, and the College of William & Mary. She received her B.S. from the University of Kansas and her Ph.D. in finance from Pennsylvania State University. Professor Boone also held visiting positions at Vanderbilt during the Fall of 2018 and at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Finance for the 2014-2015 academic year.

Her research areas include mergers & acquisitions, corporate restructuring, governance structures, and disclosure. According to Google Scholar, her papers have been cited over 6,900 times. She has published in in top finance, accounting, and a law journals including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Finance, Journal of Corporate Finance, Financial Management, Accounting Review, and Journal of Law and Economics.

Work on corporate mergers and acquisitions investigates the private phase of the bidding process, including method of sale (auctions versus negotiations), the winner's curse, termination provisions, appraisal litigation, and M&A teams.

Research on corporate governance includes examining the determinants of board size and composition, the reasons parent firms maintain ownership stakes in subsidiaries following divestitures, exploring specialized equity claims, and the spillover effects when one party to a strategic alliance or joint venture files for bankruptcy.

Work on disclosure includes the effect of institutional ownership, particularly by indexers, on a firm's public information environment, firms that redact information at their initial public offering, and exploring the consequences of the SEC's policy to defer to the foreign firm’s home-market rules for the content, timing, and materiality threshold of periodic and ongoing disclosures on Form 6-K. Other work examines the consequences on employees of disclosing of the CEO pay ratio, which is a relatively simple, yet salient, metric.