Using data on the backgrounds of board members of S&P companies, we show that venture capitalists (VCs) play an important role in mature public firms long after their initial public offering (IPO). Almost one-third of mature public companies have at least one VC director on their board. VC...

Hedge fund activists target firms engaging in empire building and improve their future acquisition and divestiture strategy. Following intervention, activist targets make fewer acquisitions but obtain substantially higher returns by avoiding large and diversifying deals and refraining from...

Voluntary disclosures play an increasingly larger role in the corporate world, yet their implications remain controversial. On the one hand, voluntary disclosures create value by decreasing information asymmetry between managers and investors. On the other hand, they may be used...

We study the relation between the educational background of chief executive officers (CEOs) and firm performance for firms traded on Borsa Istanbul (BIST) between 2009-2015. We focus on manufacturing firms and analyze two different measures of performance, namely operating performance and...

We show that one third of S&P 1500 firms have private equity (PE) professionals on their boards. PE director appointments are followed by changes in firm investment policies; specifically, by significant declines in R&D outlays, capital expenditures, and innovation activity of public firms. PE...

We study the innovation activity of firms going public and find that post-IPO innovation activity is highly associated with pre-IPO innovation activity at both venture-capital- and non-venture-capital-backed firms. This persistence in innovation suggests that firms' pre-IPO innovation experience...

We investigate the effect of creditor rights on the probability of becoming a takeover target by constructing firm-level bond covenant indices. Our primary result is that the more financial covenants a firm has, the more likely it is to become the target of an acquisition. This finding is robust...

We study innovation in newly public firms and find that VC-backing negatively impacts patent production and citations within the initial years of an IPO. Finding this effect to be more pronounced at firms with higher innovation activity pre-IPO, we conclude that this adverse impact is a...

We examine the relationship between the Governance Index (G-Index) and convertible bonduse by firms, specifically in the presence or absence of covenants. We find that the better theshareholder governance (lower G-Index) of firms, the more they are likely to issue convertibleinstead of straight...

This paper investigates the importance of accessing public capital markets through an initial public offering (IPO), and the consequent relaxation of firms’ financial constraints, for firm-level long term employment decisions. We find that firms significantly increase post-IPO investment in...