This paper investigates the governance structure choices of firms when there is competition between legal systems. We study the impact of the allocation of control over choice of governance and reincorporation on firms` technologies and technological specialization of countries in the context of...

We study how deregulation of corporate law affects the decision of entrepreneurs of where to incorporate.  Recent rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have enabled entrepreneurs to select their country of incorporation independently of their real seat.  We analyze foreign...

Sometimes shareholders are better off delegating to a CEO with different objectives than their own. A top manager motivated to share surpluses with workers can encourage union members to adopt efficient production methods. Bond covenants may constrain managers from acquiescing to union wage...

China has sought to improve enterprise performance not through privatisation as in other transition economies, but through corporatisation as means of improving corporate governance. Actual governance practices of corporatised Chinese firms are however seriously defective, characterized by...

Lower underpricing amongst venture-backed IPOs has been attributed to a certification role for venture capitalists. We argue that differences in underpricing per se are uninformative and possibly misleading when not controlling for differences in entrepreneurs` incentives to control...

Shipping goods internationally is risky and takes time.  To allocate risk and to finance the time gap between production and sale, a range of payment contracts is utilized.  I study the optimal choice between these payment contracts and their implications for trade.  The equilibrium contract...

Alpha is the amount by which the returns from a given asset exceed the returns from the wider market.  The standard way of estimating alpha is to correct for correlation with the market by regressing the asset's returns against the market returns over an extended period of time and then apply...

Traditional methods for analyzing portfolio returns often rely on multifactor risk assessment, and tests of significance are typically based on variants of the t-test.  This approach has serious limitations when analyzing the returns from dynamically traded portfolios that include derivative...

We model underpricing as being endogenous to the wealth loss minimization problem encountered in a stock market flotation. The benefits of reducing underpricing depend on the entrepreneur`s participation in the offering, via the secondary shares he sells, as well as the magnitude of the dilution...

We develop a model in which cash-constrained entrepreneurs seek a venture capitalist (VC) to finance a new firm. Costly monitoring is employed by VCs to reduce entrepreneurial moral hazard. When monitoring reveals poor performance, VCs want to punish the entrepreneur with liquidation. However,...