The theory of the firm suggests that firms can respond to poor contract enforcement by vertically integrating their production process. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms' integration opportunities affect the way institutions determine international trade patterns. We find...

Private equity firms are an important part of the industrial restructuring process. We argue that the key is temporary ownership. Buying to sell induces aggressive restructuring since the equilibrium trade sale price increases both because the profits of the acquiring incumbent increase and the...

Motivated by agency theory and arguments from linguistic studies, we argue in this paper the internationalization of a firm’s audit committee to be associated with weaker firm-level corporate governance. Based on 2,015 publicly traded European firms from 16 countries over 2000-2018, we find...

We use exceptionally rich data on all business, economics, and engineering graduates in Sweden to study women's career progression and its causes. A wide range of observables do not explain the lack of women in top executive positions. Instead, slow career progression in the five years after the...

Building on recent research in social psychology, this paper analyzes the link between the precision of initial cash offers and M&A outcomes. About one-half of the offers are made at the precision of one or five dollars per share, and an additional one-third at the precision of half dollar or...

Boards hire and fire CEOs based on imperfect information. Using comprehensive data on 28 cohorts in Sweden, we analyze the role of a potentially important attribute—CEO health—in corporate governance. Boards hire CEOs who are healthier than other high-skill professionals, in particular in...

The paper studies how stock price misvaluation and financial frictions affect whether an acquisition occurs between or within industries and whether the acquirer pays in cash or stocks. I set up a model where stock market misvaluation correlates within industries and across industries and assume...

The purpose of this study is to present a unique database on commercialized patents and to illustrate how it can be used to analyze the commercialization process of patents. The dataset is based on a survey of Swedish patents owned by inventors and small firms with a remarkably high response...

In this paper we examine the role of the CFO in setting risk management strategy with respect to macroeconomic risk, in particular, and we consider the information requirements for setting a strategy that is consistent with corporate objectives. We argue that macroeconomic risk management...

Does the matching between workers and jobs help explain productivity differentials across firms? To address this question we develop a job-worker allocation quality measure (JAQ) by combining employer-employee administrative data with machine learning techniques. The proposed measure is...