This Paper looks at the effects of entrepreneurial optimism on financial contracting and corporate performance. Optimism may increase effort, but is bad for adaptation decisions as the entrepreneur underweights negative information. The first-best contract with an optimist uses contingencies to...

We consider the motives for a firm to engage in corporate venturing. We argue that in case of failure of a new venture, corporate venture capitalists (CVC) have a strategic advantage relative to traditional venture capitalists (VC) in creating rents after rehiring or refinancing the...

We study the implications of ownership and its induced incentives on firm performance in the ‘New Economy’. Instead of traditional performance we use firm survival on the stock market as the performance indicator. Using a unique data set of all 341 firms listed on the Neuer Markt, the German...

This Paper compares the financing of new ventures in start-ups (entrepreneurship) and in established firms (intrapreneurship). Intrapreneurship allows established firms to use information on failed intrapreneurs to redeploy them into other jobs. Instead, failed entrepreneurs must seek other jobs...

Innovative new ventures fail if they cannot attract resources needed to commercialise new ideas and inventions. Obtaining external resources is a central issue for nascent entrepreneurs - people who are in the process of starting new ventures. We argue in this paper that, a way to deal with this...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

This paper analyzes why corporate governance matters for stock returns if the stock market prices the underlying managerial agency problem correctly. Our theory assumes that strict corporate governance prevents managers from diverting cash flows, but reduces incentives for managerial effort. In...

This Paper develops an account of the role and significance of managerial power and rent extraction in executive compensation. Under the optimal contracting approach to executive compensation, which has dominated academic research on the subject, pay arrangements are set by a board of directors...

This Paper provides an overview of the main theoretical elements and empirical underpinnings of a ‘managerial power’ approach to executive compensation. Under this approach, the design of executive compensation is viewed not only as an instrument for addressing the agency problem between...