We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

This paper presents a model of the financial structure of private equity firms. In the model, the general partner of the firm encounters a sequence of deals over time where the exact quality of each deal cannot be credibly communicated to investors. We show that the optimal financing arrangement...

This paper studies the choice of organizational forms in a multi-task principal-agent model. We compare a functional organization in which the firm is organized into functional departments such as marketing and R&D to a product-based organization in which the firm is organized into product...

We formalize the phenomenon of disruptive technologies (Christensen, 1997) that initially serve isolated market niches and, as they mature, expand to displace established technologies from mainstream segments. Using a model of horizontal and vertical differentiation with discrete customer...

It is commonly perceived that firms do not want to be outsiders to a merger between competitor firms. We instead argue that it is beneficial to be a non-merging rival firm to a large horizontal merger. Using a sample of mergers with expert-identification of relevant rivals and the event-study...

We show that the development of the financial sector does not change monotonically over time. In particular, we find that by most measures, countries were more financially developed in 1913 than in 1980 and only recently have they surpassed their 1913 levels. This pattern is inconsistent with...

Empirical evidence suggests that most advertisements contain little direct information. Many do not mention prices. We analyse a monopoly firm’s choice of advertising content and the information disclosed to consumers. The firm advertises only product information, price information, or both;...

This paper studies advertising in vertically differentiated product markets with positive consumption externalities. In markets with consumption externalities, the value of the product to the consumer depends on the purchasing decisions of other consumers. In such markets, we show that firms...

This paper lays out an econometric strategy for estimating the effect of advertising on prices, by exploiting seasonal demand and imperfect targeting. We present two simple models of duopoly where firms choose prices and advertising. In times of high demand for the product, a larger fraction of...