What determines firm growth over the life-cycle? Exploiting unique firm panel data on internal organization, balance sheets and innovation, representative of the entire Canadian economy, we study recent theories that examine life-cycle patterns for firm growth. These theories include...

We investigate the effect of the power of creditors, property rights protection, and institutional quality, on bank profits using a panel of 498 banks from 46 countries. Results show that better institutions and stronger property rights protection reduce bank profits, while stronger power of...

This paper analyses the investment incentives given by contingent ownership structures that are prevalent in joint ventures. We consider a variation of the standard hold-up problem where two parties make relationship-specific investments sequentially in order to generate a joint surplus in the...

We examine corporate payout policy in dual-class firms. The expropriation hypothesis predicts that dual-class firms pay out less to shareholders because entrenched managers want to maximize the value of assets under control and the associated private benefits. The pre-commitment hypothesis...

We develop and test a model that investigates how controlling shareholders' expropriation incentives affect firm values during crisis and subsequent recovery periods. Consistent with the prediction of our model, we find that, during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Asian firms with weaker...

We demonstrate that a multi-period model, and the valuations it implies, is essential for understanding inefficiency in cooperative organizational forms. Investment is efficient given the supply of input, but economic inefficiency arises because of over-supply of input induced by suppliers...

This paper studies investment incentives in the steady state of a dynamic bilateral matching market. Because of search frictions, both parties in a match are partially locked-in when they bargain over the joint surplus from their sunk investments. The associated holdup problem depends on market...

Business strategy can be defined as a firm's plan to generate economic profits based on lower cost, better quality, or new products. The analysis of business strategy is thus at the intersection of market competition and a firm's efforts to secure persistently superior performance via...

Public firms provide a large amount of information through their disclosures. In addition, information intermediaries publicly analyze, discuss and disseminate these disclosures. Thus, greater public firm presence in an industry should reduce uncertainty in that industry. Following the...

Using a dynamic model of financing, investment, and macroeconomic risk, we investigate when firms sell assets to fund investments (financing asset sales) across the business cycle. Equity financed investment transfers wealth from equity to debt because asset volatility declines and earnings...