The fast growth of Chinese private sector firms is taken as evidence that informal finance can facilitate firm growth better than formal banks in developing countries. We examine firm financing patterns and growth using a database of twenty-four hundred Chinese firms. While a relatively small...

We examine how well several institutional- and firm-level factors explain firms' perceptions of property rights protection. The institutional theories we investigate account for approximately 50% of the country-level variation, indicating that current research addresses first-order factors....

We examine the predictive power of equilibrium dominance in experimental markets where firms with investment opportunities have an informational advantage over potential investors and are permitted to purchase a money-burning signal. Equilibrium dominance often fails to predict well when a...

Event studies often include cross-sectional regressions of announcement effects on exogenous variables. If the event is voluntary and investors are rational, then standard OLS and GLS estimators are inconsistent. Consistent ML estimators are constructed for a cross-sectional model of horizontal...

This article shows how both technological and competitive risks affect the timing of private and initial public offerings in an emerging industry. Early private financing occurs in industries that are perceived to be risky, with high development costs and low probability of being displaced by...

The effect of financial policy on a firm's incentives to maintain its reputation for producing a high-quality product is analyzed. It is demonstrated that in certain situations debt will reduce a firm's ability to credibly offer high-quality products and, as a consequence, will reduce its value....

This study investigates experimental financial markets in which firms possess more information than do potential investors. Firms were given opportunities to undertake positive net present value projects which they could either forgo or finance by selling equity. Auctions were conducted among...