The Berle-Means problem - information and incentive asymmetries disrupting relations between knowledgeable managers and remote investors - has remained a durable issue engaging researchers since the 1930's. However, the Berle-Means paradigm - widely-dispersed, helpless investors facing strong,...

Firms' Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity has become the subject of a large literature in recent years. This paper analyzes CSR activity using quasi-experimental variation created by Section 135 of India's Companies Act of 2013, which requires (on a "comply-or-explain" basis) that...

Direct experience of a peer's punishment might make non-punished peers reassess the probability and consequences of facing punishment and hence induce a change in their behavior. We test this mechanism in a setting, China, in which we observe the reactions to the same peer's punishment by listed...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

This paper studies the causal effect of technology and knowledge transfers on early industrial development. Between 1950 and 1957, the Soviet Union supported the "156 Projects" in China for building technologically advanced industrial facilities. We exploit idiosyncratic delays in project...

We study the effect of exposure to communism (EC), a political-economic regime based on collectivist planning, on preferences for family supports, which we refer to as "informal family insurance". We exploit both cross-country and cohort variation in EC in a large sample of Central and Eastern...

This paper investigates telecommunication operator investment in broadband infrastructure after local deregulation of the wholesale broadband access market. Using a panel dataset covering all 5,598 exchange areas in the United Kingdom, we exploit regional differences in deregulation following a...

This paper addresses the issue of how regulatory constraints affect firm s investment choices when the firm has an option to delay investment. The RPI-x rule is compared to a profit sharing rule, which increases the x factor in case profits go beyond a given level. It is shown that a pure price...

In this article we analyse the effects of different regulatory schemes (price cap and profit sharing) on a firm s investment of endogenous size. Using a real option approach in continuous time, we show that profit sharing does not affect a firm s start-up decision relative to a pure price cap...