Despite the incentives of incumbent domestic listed corporations (DLCs) in the electricity generation industry, private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have played an outsized role in financing the energy transition. These new entrants are twice as likely to create...

From 2010 to 2021, 639 US VC-funded firms achieved unicorn status. We investigate why there are so many unicorns and why controlling shareholders give investors privileges to obtain unicorn status. We show that unicorns rely more than other VC-funded firms on organizational capital as well as...

Despite its large and increasing size in the U.S. and Europe, there is relatively little research on the private debt (PD) market, particularly compared to the bank and syndicated loan markets. Accordingly, in this paper, we survey U.S. and European investors with private debt assets under...

We use variation in state corporate income tax rates to re-examine the relation between taxes and corporate leverage. Contrary to prior research, we find that corporate leverage rises after tax cuts for small private firms. An estimated dynamic equilibrium model shows that tax cuts make capital...

The provision of venture debt financing to growth-oriented startups which are backed by venture capital (VC) equity has been a bit of a puzzle given the lack of positive cash flows or traditional collateral of such startups. This short paper lays out the hurdles for debt to overcome to be a...

We analyze determinants of access to venture capital for Black founders of high-growth startups. We combine image- and name-processing algorithms with clerical review to identify race for over 100,000 startup founders "at risk" for venture funding. Black founders raise roughly one-third as much...

Shareholder power in the US grew over recent decades due to a steep rise in concentrated institutional ownership. Using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database for 1982-2015, this paper examines the impact of increases in concentrated institutional...

This paper develops a unified theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium, in a setting without takeovers and controlling shareholders. A voting premium emerges when a minority blockholder tries to influence the composition of the shareholder base by accumulating votes and buying...

This paper investigates the 2013 three-fold increase in the French dividend tax rate. Using administrative data covering the universe of firms from 2008-2017 and a quasi-experimental setting, we find that firms swiftly cut dividend payments and used this tax-induced increase in liquidity to...

We present a mechanism based on managerial incentives through which common ownership affects product market outcomes. Firm-level variation in common ownership causes variation in managerial incentives and productivity across firms, which leads to intra-industry and intra-firm cross-market...