The Chinese capital market, despite its relative short history in its modern form, has experienced a tremendous growth and is now the second largest in the world. Due to China's tight capital controls, the development of its capital market has mostly been isolated from and hence not been well...

We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment and Tobin's q. A firm is financed partly by insiders, who control its assets, and partly by outside investors. When their wealth is scarce, insiders earn a rate of return higher...

This paper analyzes the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system affect the extraction of private benefits by company insiders. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income insiders divert and thus worsens governance...

This paper examines governance explanations for the discount of preferred shares to common shares in the Russian market. conflicts between shareholder classes may help explain the discount. However, for this to be the sole explanation the estimated models suggest that the magnitude of future...

We study how perceived government support for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), can shut out non-SOEs in China's credit market, causing severe segmentation in credit pricing. Since 2018Q2, amid government-led credit tightening, the SOE premium – the difference in credit spreads between non-SOE...

Classic Big Push industrialization envisions state planners coordinating economic activity to internalize a range of externalities that otherwise lock in a low-income equilibrium, but runs afoul of well-known government failure problems. Successful Big Push coordination may occur instead when a...

This paper, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance co-sponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate...

This paper estimates the effect of corporate governance provisions on shareholder value and long-term outcomes in S&P1500 firms. We apply a regression discontinuity design to shareholder votes on governance proposals in annual meetings. A close-call vote around the majority threshold is akin to...

Economics has firms maximizing value and people maximizing utility, but firms are run by people. Agency theory concerns the mitigation of this internal contradiction in capitalism. Firms need charters, regulations and laws to restrain those entrusted with their governance, just as economies need...