The pervasiveness of research agreements between pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies is puzzling, since it is hard to contract on the exact nature of the research activities. A major concern of financing companies is that the Ramp;D firms use their funding to subsidize other projects or...

How do individuals decide to become entrepreneurs and learn to make optimal entrepreneurial decisions? The concentration of entrepreneurs in regions such as Silicon Valley has stimulated research and policy interest into the influence of peers, but the causal effect is hard to identify...

We analyze how variations in contractibility affect the design of contracts in the context of biotechnology research agreements. A major concern of firms financing biotechnology research is that the R&D firms might use the funding to subsidize other projects or substitute one project for...

To what extent do peers affect our occupational choices? This question has been of particular interest in the context of entrepreneurship and policies to create a favorable environment for entry. Such influences, however, are hard to identify empirically. We exploit the assignment of students...

We analyze how contractibility affects contract design. A major concern when designing research agreements is that researchers use their funding to subsidize other projects. We show that, when research activities are not contractible, an option contract is optimal. The financing firm obtains the...

We argue that individual characteristics of managers can explain capital structure decisions like debt conservatism and pecking-order financing choices. Moreover, they can explain cross-sectional variation in these decisions despite identical firm characteristics. We link the reluctance of...

We analyze the impact of winning high-profile tournaments on the subsequent behavior of the tournament winner in the context of chief executive officers of U.S. corporations. We find that the firms of CEOs who achieve quot;superstarquot; status via prestigious nationwide awards from the business...