Economic theories suggest that a firm's corporate culture matters for its policy choices. We construct a parent-spinoff firm panel dataset that allows us to identify culture effects in firm policies from behavior that is inherited by a spinoff firm from its parent after the firms split up. We...

We develop an empirical framework that allows us to analyze the effects of heterogeneity across large shareholders, using a new blockholder-firm panel data set in which we can track all unique blockholders among large public U.S. firms. We find statistically significant and economically...

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm policies and performance, but identifying an effect empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. However, unlike other blockholders, individuals tend to hold blocks in corporations that are located close...

We study a large data set of stock portfolios held by individuals and organizations in the Swedish stock market. The dividend yields on these port-folios are systematically related to investors' relative tax preferences for dividends versus capital gains. Tax-neutral investors earn 40 basis...

I study the security design problem of a firm when investors rather than managers have private information about the firm. I find that it is often optimal to issue information-sensitive securities like equity. The "folklore proposition of debt" from traditional signalling models only goes...

Using a data set that provides unprecedented details on the stockholders of Swedish listed companies, we analyze whether investors take into account corporate governance when they select stocks. We identify the companies where shareholders’ value is less likely to be maximized by using the...

This paper embeds security design in a model of evolutionary learning. We consider a competitive and perfect financial market where agents, as in Allen and Gale (1988), have heterogeneous valuations for cash flows. Our point of departure is that, instead of assuming that agents are endowed with...

A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495 transactions with a focus on...

In capital intensive industries, firms face complicated multi-stage financing, investment, and production decisions under the watchful eye of existing and potential industry rivals. We consider a two-stage simplification of this environment. In the first stage, an incumbent firm benefits from...

The average firm going public or issuing new equity has underperformed the market in the long run. Endogeneity of the number of new issues has been proposed as a potential explanation of this long-run underperformance. Under pseudo market timing of new issues, ex post measures of average...