Prior work has established that the financing environment can impact firm strategy. We argue that this influence can shape the earliest strategic choices of a new venture by creating a potential tradeoff between two objectives: rapid growth and reaping the benefits of a positive reputation...

Entrepreneurs must choose between alternative strategies for bringing their idea to market. They face uncertainty regarding both the quality of their idea as well as the efficacy of each strategy. While entrepreneurs can reduce this uncertainty by conducting tests, any single test conflates the...

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

We study the effects of going public using a unique panel of firms in 16 European countries for which we observe financial data before and after firms' initial-public-offering (IPO) attempts. We compare firms that complete their IPO with firms that withdraw their IPO. We instrument the going...

Profitability, as measured by gross profits-to-assets, has roughly the same power as book-to-market predicting the cross-section of average returns. Profitable firms generate significantly higher average returns than unprofitable firms, despite having, on average, lower book-to-markets and...

This paper analyzes the effects of the formation of a regional trade agreement on the level and nature of multinational firm activity. We examine aggregate data that captures the response of U.S. multinational firms to the formation of the ASEAN free trade agreement. Observed patterns guide the...

This paper introduces new nonparametric statistical methods to evaluate zero-cost investment strategies. We focus on directional trading strategies, risk-adjusted returns, and the investor's decisions under uncertainty as the core of our analysis. By relying on classification tools with a long...