When there is uncertainty about a CEO's quality, news about the firm causes rational investors to update their expectation of the firm's value for two reasons: Updates occur because of the direct effect of the news, and also because news leads investors to update their assessment of the CEO's...

We evaluate whether management risk, coming from uncertainty about management's value added, affects firms' default risks and debt pricing. We find that, regardless of the reason for the turnover, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all increase at the time of management turnover,...

Can algorithms assist firms in their decisions on nominating corporate directors? Directors predicted to do poorly by algorithms indeed do poorly compared to a realistic pool of candidates in out-of-sample tests. Predictably bad directors are more likely to be male, accumulate more...

This paper presents a History Friendly Model which addresses the issue of the bifurcation in technological styles" between US and Britain during the nineteenth century. The model aims at gaining a better understanding of the micro-dynamics that gave rise to different patterns of innovation in...

A new model of economic growth introduces the knowledge filter between new knowledge and economically useful knowledge. It identifies both new ventures and incumbent firms as the mechanisms that penetrate the knowledge filter. Recent empirical work has shown that new firms are more proficient at...

We develop a model in which stronger protection of intellectual property rights has an inverted U-shaped effect on innovation. Intellectual property rights protection allows the incumbent firms to capture part of the rents of commercial exploration that would otherwise accrue to the...

In this study, we quantify the role of foreign-born founders in high-tech entrepreneurship in a nationally representative sample of rapidly growing high-impact companies. This class of companies drives job creation and aggregate growth in the U.S. We find that, while most previous studies have...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate. And how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external...

This paper investigates the causes of the shortfall in private R&D expenditure of the EU compared to the US. It shows that differences in the structure of the two economies play only a minor role in explaining the R&D gap. Instead, the European R&D shortfall is mainly caused by a negative...

Does exporting intermediate goods induce learning from importers? In this paper, we examine to what extent learning from German industries can be explained by knowledge spillovers, channeled through the export of intermediate goods. Our study is based on a sample of 27 German trade partners in...