We test whether dividend taxes affect corporate investments. We exploit Sweden's 2006 dividend tax cut of 10 percentage points for closely held corporations and five percentage points for widely held corporations. Using rich administrative panel data and triple-difference estimators, we find...

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected...

Manpower constraints are the pervasive lack of specialized high- and low-skill workers, irrespective of the wage firms might offer. For a panel of German firms, we show manpower-constrained firms have higher capacity utilization and longer backlog of orders (measured in months). They are more...

Stablecoins rise to meet the demand for safe assets in decentralized finance. Stablecoin issuers transform risky reserve assets into tokens of stable values, deploying a variety of tactics. To address the questions on the viability of stablecoins, regulations, and the initiatives led by large...

Stablecoins rise to meet the demand for safe assets in decentralized finance. Stablecoin issuers transform risky reserve assets into tokens of stable values, deploying a variety of tactics. To address the questions on the viability of stablecoins, regulations, and the initiatives led by large...

Manpower constraints are the pervasive lack of specialized high- and low-skill workers, irrespective of the wage firms might offer. For a panel of German firms, we show manpower-constrained firms have higher capacity utilization and longer backlog of orders (measured in months). They are more...

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 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...

We study how firms adjust their financial positions around the times when they undertake lumpy adjustments in capital or employment. Using U.S. firm level data, we document systematic patterns of cash and debt financing around lumpy adjustment, remarkably similar across capital and employment....

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...