This paper examines the determinants of inter vivos (lifetime) transfers of ownership in German family firms between 2000 and 2013. Survey evidence indicates that owners of larger firms, and firms with strong current business conditions, transfer ownership at higher rates than others. When a...

Performance-raising practices tend to diffuse slowly in the health care sector. To understand how incentives drive adoption, I study a practice that generates revenue for hospitals: submitting detailed documentation about patients. After a 2008 reform, hospitals could raise their Medicare...

Private equity funds hold assets that are hard to value. Managers may have an incentive to distort reported valuations if these are used by investors to decide on commitments to subsequent funds managed by the same firm. Using a large dataset of buyout and venture funds, we test for the presence...

We test and compare the effects of introduction of two new financial information technologies, EDGAR and XBRL, on well-known asset pricing anomalies often attributed to mispricing. EDGAR facilitates easier access to public accounting information about public firms; XBRL reduces the cost of...

A carbon tax has been widely discussed as a way of reducing fossil fuel use and mitigating climate change, generally in a static framework. Unlike standard goods that can be produced, oil is an exhaustible resource. Parts of its price reflects scarcity rents, i.e., the fact that there is limited...

This paper investigates how increases in concentration can be interrupted or reversed by changes in how firms compete on quality. We examine the U.S. hotel industry during the past half century. We document that starting in the early 1980s, quality competition came more in the form of costs that...

Using data from about seven millions room postings by hotels in France and the UK, we document that, rather than smoothly decreasing to zero, cancellation premia remain positive at roughly 10% to 15% of the full price until two days before the stay. A model where travelers have different...

Agglomeration is a location pattern frequently observed in service industries such as hotels. This paper empirically examines if agglomeration facilitates tacit collusion in the lodging industry using a quarterly dataset of hotels that operated in rural areas across Texas between 2003 and 2005....

Using a sample of highly (over-)leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance (return on assets, net profit margin). In particular, a reduction in leverage leads to a decrease in...