We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and activist institutional...

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...

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...

Most listed firms are freestanding in the U.S, while listed firms in other countries often belong to business groups: lasting structures in which listed firms control other listed firms. Hand-collected historical data illuminate how the present ownership structure of the United States arose: (1)...

We study the resource allocation decisions of U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs). We examine how established MNCs grow across countries and how firm-specific resources and host country financial-market development influence MNC growth. We find evidence of intra-firm trade-offs to growth in...

This paper presents an overview of the history of corporate governance in the United States, emphasizing the period before the advent of federal securities laws and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Recent research has overturned many widely accepted beliefs about corporate...

This paper models and estimates ex ante safety-net benefits at a sample of large banks in US and Europe during 2003-2008. Our results suggest that difficult-to-fail and unwind (DFU) banks enjoyed substantially higher ex ante benefits than other institutions. Safety-net benefits prove...

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of internal vs. external capital allocation. We focus primarily on comparing an internal capital market to bank lending. While both represent centralized forms of financing, in the former case the financing is owner-provided,...

Using a novel data of institutional investors' bond holdings, we examine a transmission of the crisis of 2007-2008 from the securitized bond market to the corporate bond market via joint ownership of these bonds by investors. We posit that, ceteris paribus, corporate bonds held by investors with...

How do macro-financial shocks affect investor behavior and market dynamics? Recent evidence suggests long-lasting effects of personally experienced outcomes on investor beliefs and investment but also significant differences across older and younger generations. We formalize experience-based...