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 paper links real investment policy to corporate risk management, endogenizing the costs of external financing. Previous literature finds investment efficiency linked to full hedging. In this model, a firm with proprietary information when deciding its investment in a valuable project, may...

In a study of the ownership of German corporations, we find a strong relation between board turnover and corporate performance, little association of concentrations of ownership with managerial disciplining and only limited evidence that pyramid structures can be used for control purposes. The...

While we associate the U.K. with a high level of investor protection, this was not the case in the first half of the twentieth century - U.K. capital markets were marked by an absence of investor protection and few common law rights for minorities. Notwithstanding this, securities markets...

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...

This paper examines how foreign ownership affects the investment decisions of subsidiary firms using a new dataset of listed-parent - listed-subsidiary pairs.  We find that improvements in the investment opportunities of parent firms have a negative effect on the investment of their...

Whether they are financial, economic, or psychological, discount rates affect most economic decisions: investment and savings, hirings and firings, defaults and refinancing, financial and economic reforms, learning and experimentation, and any other decision with long-term consequences, such as...

This paper addresses the hotly-debated question: do Chinese firms overinvest?  A firm-level dataset of 100,000 firms over the period of 2000-07 is employed for this purpose.  We initially calculate measures of investment efficiency, which is typically negatively associated with...

The paper is concerned with foreign investment in developing countries and the incentives offered to attract that investment in relation to the use of a possible future multilateral investment agreement as a commitment device over incentive levels. The existing literature has identified two...

Credit subsidies in targeted industrial sectors or geographical areas are a primary mechanism of industrial and redistributive policy throughout the world. Using a unique panel of bank-firm relationships, we study the impact of interest-rate subsidies on the total amount of borrowing and on the...