Using a large dataset of firm-bank and ownership information for 23 European countries over 2008-2015, we study the dynamics of bank relationships after corporate acquisitions and the effects of changing banks on firm performance. Foreign acquirers do not rely on internal capital markets but...

Do futures markets have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on commodity prices? Empirical evidence is inconclusive. We try to resolve this question by means of a learning-to-forecast experiment in which a futures market and a spot market are coupled. The spot market exhibits negative feedback...

We investigate whether two heuristics, the peak-end rule and herding, lead to cognitive biases in the index of consumer sentiment published by the University of Michigan. Both affect respondents' assessment of changes in their financial position over the past year. Consistent with the peak-end...

Analyzing over 15 years of account-level trading records from Finland, we show that option features-expiration, moneyness, and the strike price-influence the behavior of retail investors and exacerbate their behavioral biases. Retail investors selectively exploit the expiration feature of...

Does venture capital (VC) investment yield economic growth? A large literature studies the effect of VC investments on firm-level activity, but its effects on economic growth are less well understood. We identify the effect of VC investment flows on destination county employment, wages, and...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

This paper uses a unified treatment of real options and game theory to examine value appropriation in takeovers within a competitive environment of imperfect information. The integrated model considers a potential target as a shared real option on a bundle of resources. Competing potential...

An interlock between two firms occurs if the firms share one or more directors in their boards of directors. We explore the effect of interlocks on firm performance for 101 large Dutch firms using a large and new panel database. We use five different performance measures, and for each...

We allow the preference of a political majority to determine boththe corporate governance structure and the division of profits betweenhuman and financial capital. In a democratic society where financialwealth is concentrated, a political majority may prefer to restraingovernance by dispersed...

The paper seeks to explain the huge cross country variation in private pension funding,shaped by historical choice made when universal pension systems were created after theGreat Depression. According to Perotti and von Thadden (2006), large inflationaryshocks due to war damage devastated middle...