Politicians and regulators rely on feedback from the public when setting policies. For-profit corporations and non-pro t entities are active in this process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policymakers (and the public at large), however, may be unaware of the...

We present new evidence on the effect of grants on charities' incomes. We employ a novel identification strategy, focusing on charities that applied for lottery grant funding and comparing outcomes for successful and unsuccessful applicants. Overall, grants do not crowd out other income but the...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. However, the manager can use her...

Corporate versus pass-through status trades off benefits (perpetual identity, limited liability, public trading, earnings retention) against tax wedges, estimated from U.S. taxes on corporate profits, dividends, and partnership income. In regressions, C-corporate economic shares decline with the...

This paper examines the relation between ownership, corporate form, and innovation for a cross-section of private and publicly traded innovating firms in the US and 15 European countries. A striking novel observation emerges from our analysis: while most innovating firms in the US are publicly...

CEOs have a potential conflict of interest when their company is acquired: they can bargain to be retained by the acquirer and for private benefits rather than for a higher premium to be paid to the shareholders. We investigate the determinants of target CEO retention by the acquirer and whether...

Three types of firms -- nonprofit, for-profit, and government -- own U.S. hospitals, yet we do not know whether ownership results in the specialization of medical service provision. This study of over 30 medical services in urban, general hospitals (1988-2000) shows that ownership types...

The U.S. personal bankruptcy system functions as a bankruptcy system for small businesses as well as consumers, because debts of non-corporate firms are personal liabilities of the firms' owners. If the firm fails, the owner has an incentive to file for bankruptcy, since both business debts and...

By double taxing the income of corporate firms but not unincorporated firms, taxes can play an important role in a firm's choice of organizational form. The sensitivity of the organizational form decision to tax rates can also be used to approximate the efficiency cost of the corporate income...

We provide an autopsy of the patterns of corporate control and ownership concentration in a dataset covering more than 40,000 listed firms from 127 countries over 2004−2012. Employing a plethora of original and secondary sources, big data techniques, and applying the Shapley-Shubik algorithm...