Why do firms go public? Despite the existence of many theories addressing this question, lack of data on private firms before they are public hampers our ability to test these theories. We circumvent this challenge by testing reverse predictions of going public theories using firms' decisions to...

We investigate how firms weigh the costs and benefits of being public in the decision to opt out of the public market and go private. We draw on previous studies of going private and on the subsequent well-developed theoretical literature on why firms go public to develop our hypotheses. We...

Recent evidence indicates that cycles in valuation and managers ability to time the market partly explain the pattern of many corporate financing activities, such as equity issuances and mergers. In this paper, we challenge the importance of market timing in driving financing waves by examining...

This paper studies the determinants of the success of industry consolidations using a unique sample of firms established at the time of their initial public offering: roll-up IPOs. In these transactions, small, private firms merge into a shell company, which goes public at the same time. These...

Several changes, such as the advances in information technology and the advent of outsourcing, led to increases in optimal firm size in many fragmented industries over the last decade. This paper studies the determinants of the success of these industry consolidations using a unique sample of...

The use of stock repurchases has fluctuated dramatically over the last two decades: Aggregate repurchases peaked in 1999, when the use of repurchases came close to surpassing the use of dividends, and reached a low in 1991, when the repurchases amounted to only a quarter of dividends. Though...

Agency problems are an important determinant of corporate liquidity. For a sample of more than 11,000 firms from 45 countries, we find that corporations in countries where shareholders rights are not well protected hold up to twice as much cash as corporations in countries with good shareholder...

This study examines the motivations for and empirical performance of roll-up transactions, a special class of initial public equity offering where multiple small business entities are consolidated into a single publicly traded company. Using a sample of 47 deals initiated between 1994 and 1998,...

This paper investigates how firms determine the capital structure of a subsidiary that is divested in a spin-off. In a spin-off, the parent divides the assets of the firm and chooses the capital structure for the new, stand-alone entity. Unlike the firms in other capital structure studies, the...