From 2010 to 2021, 639 US VC-funded firms achieved unicorn status. We investigate why there are so many unicorns and why controlling shareholders give investors privileges to obtain unicorn status. We show that unicorns rely more than other VC-funded firms on organizational capital as well as...

Bank payout policy is strongly affected by regulation and politics, especially for the largest banks. Banks, but not industrial firms, have consistently lower payouts in times of high regulation uncertainty and under democratic presidents. After the Global Financial Crisis, bank regulators'...

This paper assesses the current state of knowledge about crisis risk and its implications for risk management. Better data that became available since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has improved our understanding of crisis risk. These data have been used to show that some types of crises...

Existing evidence shows convincingly that expected cash flows of non-financial firms can be negatively affected by their total risk, so that non-financial firms can create shareholder wealth by managing their total risk. After reviewing theories that demonstrate links between firm value and...

This paper documents new and empirically important interactions between cash-balance and leverage dynamics. Cash ratios typically vary widely over extended horizons, with dynamics remarkably similar to (and complementary with) those of capital structure. Leverage and cash dynamics interact...

With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020, small business lending through fintech lenders collapsed. We explore the reasons for the market shutdown using detailed data about loan applications, offers, and take-up from a major small business fintech credit platform. We document that...

We develop a theory of bank board risk committees. With this theory, such committees are valuable even though there is no expectation that bank risk is lower if the bank has a well-functioning risk committee. As predicted by our theory (1) many large and complex banks voluntarily chose to have a...

We open the black box of the M&A decision process by constructing a comprehensive sample of US firms with specialized M&A staff. We investigate whether specialized M&A staff improves acquisition performance or facilitates managerial empire building instead. We find that firms with specialized...

For many firms, the acquisition process begins with the development of an acquisition plan that is communicated to investors. We construct a comprehensive sample of acquisition plans to provide novel perspectives on the acquisition process and find that acquisition plans are informative to...

Average idiosyncratic volatility and firm idiosyncratic volatility increase with the number of listed firms. Average industry idiosyncratic volatility increases with the number of listed firms in the industry. We ex-plain the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and the number of listed...