We show theoretically and empirically that executives are paid less for their own firm’s performance and more for their rivals’ performance if an industry’s firms are more commonly owned by the same set of investors. Higher common ownership also leads to higher unconditional total pay. We...

We reveal motivations of Chinese firms for issuing Seasoned Equity Offerings (SEO) by examining why firms change the use of SEO proceeds and how they use unspecified SEO proceeds. Using 533 SEOs issued by Chinese firms during 1999-2006, we find that firms do not use unspecified SEO proceeds on...

We study optimal security design when the issuer and market participants agree to disagree about the characteristics of the asset to be securitized. We show that pooling assets can be optimal because it mitigates the effects of disagreement between issuer and investors, whereas tranching a...

Using Dutch data we empirically investigate how financing and innovation vary across firm characteristics. We find that when firms face financial constraints, debt financing and innovation choices are not independent of firm characteristics, and R&D slows down. In the absence of financial...

This paper introduces a new rationale for the existence of Directors' and Officers' (D&O) insurance. We use a model with volatile stock markets where shareholders design compensation schemes that incentivize managers to stimulate short-term increases in stock prices that do not maximize long run...

Almost two thirds of the cross-plant dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital occurs across plants within the same firm rather than between firms. Even though firms allocate invest- ment very differently across their plants, they do not equalize marginal revenue products across their...