We study how access to private equity financing affects real firm activities using a broad panel of publicly traded U.S. firms that raise external equity through private placements (PIPEs) between 1995 and 2008. The public firms relying on PIPEs are generally small, high-tech firms that cannot...

We study a setting wherein a divisional manager undertakes personally costly effort to improve the profitability of an investment project. The manager's choice of innovation effort is subject to a holdup problem because of the ex post opportunism on the part of headquarters. We analyze and...

This paper considers the financing of a research project under uncertainty about the time of completion and the probability of eventual success. The uncertainty about future success gradually diminishes with the arrival of addtional funding. The entrepreneur controls the funds and can divert...

This Paper considers the financing of a research project under uncertainty about the time of completion and the probability of eventual success. The uncertainty about future success diminishes gradually with the arrival of additional funding. The entrepreneur controls the funds and can divert...

In our model multiple innovators compete against each other by submitting investment proposals to an investor. The investor chooses the least expensive proposal and when to invest in it. Innovators have to provide costly effort and they learn privately the cost of investing. Multiple efforts...

There is great interest in evaluating the impact of private equity investments on innovation and economic growth. However, there is no direct empirical evidence on the effects of such transactions on the innovation strategies of entrepreneurial firms. We fill this gap by examining a rich...

We examine the effects of financial analysts on the real economy in the case of innovation. Our baseline results show that firms covered by a larger number of analysts generate fewer patents and patents with lower impact. To establish causality, we use a difference-in-differences approach that...

We study to what extent firms spread out their debt maturity dates across time, which we call granularity of corporate debt. We consider the role of debt granularity using a simple model in which a firm's inability to roll over expiring debt causes inefficiencies, such as costly asset sales or...

This paper reviews the impact of environmental variables on firms’ capital structure throughout the recent financial crises (dot.com bubble, subprime crisis, and European sovereign debt crisis). For the first time, the sovereign general gross debt and current account balance appear in the...

The value of debt tax shields in foundational corporate valuation models by Nobel Laureates Modigliani and Miller (MM) continues to be a controversial issue that is central to our understanding of corporate finance. This paper argues that a fundamental valuation problem exists in the MM tax...