What determines firm growth over the life-cycle? Exploiting unique firm panel data on internal organization, balance sheets and innovation, representative of the entire Canadian economy, we study recent theories that examine life-cycle patterns for firm growth. These theories include...

We examine the effect of financial dependence on acquisition and investment within existing industries by single-segment and conglomerate firms for industries undergoing different long run changes in industry conditions. Conglomerates and single-segment firms differ more in rates of...

This paper examines the impact of vertical integration on the dynamics of performance over the automobile product development lifecycle. Building on recent work in organizational economics and strategy, we evaluate the relationship between vertical integration and different performance margins....

Understanding the economic lifecycle -- how it varies and why -- is important in its own right, but is also critical to understanding how changes in population age structure influence many features of the macroeconomy. Economic behavior over the life cycle can be summarized by the average levels...

In this paper, we argue that actuarial valuation of annuity benefit streams is theoretically inconsistent with the assumption of pure lifecycle motives. Instead, we show that the simple discounted value of future benefits (ignoring the possibility of death) is often a good approximation to the...

Comparisons of individual life expectancies over time and across demographic groups provide information for individuals making retirement decisions and for policy makers. For couples, analogous measures are the expected years both spouses will be alive (joint life expectancy) and the expected...

This paper reports on the construction of a new dataset that combines data on trademark applications and registrations from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with data on firms from the U.S. Census Bureau. The resulting dataset allows tracking of various activity related to trademark use and...

We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life-cycles, and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms' balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database...

Venture capital (VC) backed firms face neither the governance requirements nor a major separation of ownership and control of their public peers. These differences suggest that independent directors could play a unique role on private firm boards. This paper explores the dynamics of VC-backed...

One of the fastest-growing areas of finance research is the study of managerial biases and their implications for firm outcomes. Since the mid-2000s, this strand of behavioral corporate finance has provided theoretical and empirical evidence on the influence of biases in the corporate realm,...