We assess whether a VC’s intrinsic commitment to a startup affects investment performance. We proxy for climate change commitment using the political contributions to democrats of the lead VC person on a deal. We find investments by democrats in climate-related startups have 8% higher...

This paper provides novel evidence that similarity in employees' political attitudes plays a role in mergers and acquisitions. Using detailed data on individual campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans, our estimates show that firms are considerably more likely to announce a merger,...

We explore three ways to classify mutual funds as ESG-oriented: by their names, their voting records, and their holdings. ESG-named funds and ESG-voting funds tend to be smaller than non-ESG funds, and spread their investment over more individual companies. They never control more than a quarter...

We identify important conflicts of interests among shareholders and examine their effects on corporate decisions. When a firm is considering an action that affects other firms in its shareholders' portfolios, shareholders with heterogeneous portfolios may disagree about whether to proceed. This...

We provide one of the first large sample comparisons of cash policies in public and private U.S. firms. We first show that on average private firms hold less than half as much cash as public firms do. The higher cash holdings of public firms are partially caused by the fact that public firms add...

A common view in the literature is that the director labor market provides an ex post settling-up for past decisions by rewarding CEO ability and actions that are consistent with shareholder interests. In this paper we focus on large CEO acquisition decisions to investigate whether the director...