We develop a dynamic model where each generation in a family firm can continue operating its inherited production technology or it could hire a professional to do the same. Though the professional is more qualified, his interests are not aligned with the interests of the family. In the context...

The average cash-to-assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms more than doubles from 1980 to 2006. A measure of the economic importance of this increase in cash holdings is that at the end of the sample period, the average firm can pay back all of its debt obligations with its cash holdings; in...

In this paper, we explain how enterprise risk management creates value for shareholders. In contrast to the existing finance literature, we emphasize the organizational benefits of risk management. We show how a firm should choose its risk appetite and measure risk when implementing enterprise...

Merton Miller was at the center of the transformation of academic finance from a descriptive field to a science. His principal contribution to this transformation was the introduction of arbitrage arguments which underlie most theoretical contributions in finance and remain central to the way...

Despite the disappearance of formal barriers to international investment across countries, we find that the average home bias of US investors towards the 46 countries with the largest equity markets did not fall from 1994 to 2004 when countries are equally weighted but fell when countries are...

We consider IPO firms from 1970 to 2001 and examine the evolution of their insider ownership over time to understand better why and how U.S. firms that become widely held do so. In our sample, a majority of firms has insider ownership below 20% after ten years. We find that a firm's stock market...

We analyze the financial statements of 58,653 firm-years from 34 countries for the period 1985-1998 to construct a panel data set measuring three dimensions of earnings opacity for each country - earnings aggressiveness, loss avoidance, and earnings smoothing. We combine these three dimensions...

Why is the mere announcement of an open-market share repurchase program, which involves no commitment to purchase shares, regarded as good news by the market? The first part of this paper provides a theoretical model to resolve this puzzle. The model predicts that firms with large underpricing...

We document that there was media hype about internet stocks during the bubble. However, the media hype about internet stocks during the bubble was discounted: though the media coverage positively affected pre-IPO value revisions, it affected internet IPOs more than non-internet IPOs only after...