How do firms finance large cash flow requirements?  We examine this in the context of firms that are subject to substantial cash flow requirements.  We find that trade credit, inventory and cash stock reductions are all important in the short term for mild requirements.  Larger and longer...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building.  We test this result with a laboratory experiment.  We...

This article reports a unique analysis of private engagements by an activist fund.  It is based on data made available to us by Hermes, the fund manager owned by the British Telecom Pension Scheme (BTPS), on engagements with management in companies targeted by its U.K. Focus Fund (HUKFF).  In...

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...

Securitisations usually involve creating multiple tranches of a single issue with different characteristics, placed on the market as separate securities. Various theoretical explanations have been advanced to explain such tranching. This paper provides the first systematic testing of such...

Several papers have argued that firms can hide profits from unions with hard debt commitments. Alternatively, here we argue that unions can manipulate the non-shirking constraint and win higher efficiency wages. By creating a culture of mistrust and an opposition to supervision ex ante, unions...

We investigate determinants of launch spreads in European securitization transactions over the last decade. First, we develop a simple, reduced-form pricing model for all issues across different transaction types and test it. We document the critical importance of credit ratings without...

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...