Both managerial ownership and performance are endogenously determined by exogenous (and only partly observed) changes in the firm's contracting environment. We extend the cross-sectional results of Demsetz and Lehn (1985) and use panel data to show that managerial ownership is explained by key...

Little is known about the characteristics of individual commercial paper issuers, or about the reasons for the countercyclical issuance of commercial paper in the aggregate. To address these issues we construct a new panel dataset linking Moody's data on commercial paper issues with Standard and...

We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints drives a firm's stock price above its fundamental value. Managers optimally respond to the stock market bubble by issuing new equity. The bubble...

Financial variables such as cash flow and cash stocks are robust and quantitatively important explanatory variables for investment at the firm-level. A large body of recent empirical work attributes these findings to capital market imperfections. This interpretation is controversial, however,...

This paper examines an effect of deregulating the market for corporate control on CEO compensation in the banking industry. Given that each state's banking regulation defines the competitiveness of its corporate control market, we examine the effect of a state's interstate banking regulation on...

One possible explanation that bidding firms earned positive abnormal returns in diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s is that internal capital markets were expected to overcome the information deficiencies of the less developed capital markets. Examining 392 bidder firms during the 1960s, we...

This paper examines the effect of the benefits of corporate control to managers on the relationship between managerial ownership and the stock returns of acquiring firms in corporate control transactions. At low levels of managerial ownership, agency costs of equity (such as perquisite...

This paper suggests that the introduction of bank branching restrictions and federal deposit insurance in the United States likely was motivated by political considerations. Specifically, we argue that these restrictions were instituted for the benefit of the small, unit banks that were unable...