We develop a model in which time-varying real investment opportunities lead to time-varying adverse selection in the market for initial public offerings. The model is consistent with several stylized facts known about the IPO market: economic expansions are associated with a dramatic increase in...

We analyze a publicly-traded firm's decision to stay public or go private, focusing on the stochastic nature of investor participation in the public market. The liquidity of public ownership is both a blessing and a curse: it facilitates trading and lowers the cost of capital, but it also...

As the regulation of public companies has progressively tightened in recent years, many companies have chosen to switch to stock exchanges with lower regulatory requirements. We analyse the consequences of switching for smaller quoted companies, using the unusual regulatory environment in...

This paper presents an assignment model of CEOs and firms. The distributions of CEO pay levels and firms' market values are analyzed as the competitive equilibrium of a matching market where talents, as well as CEO positions, are scarce. It is shown how the observed joint distribution of CEO pay...

The Law and Finance account of the ubiquity of controlling shareholders in developing markets is based on conditions in the capital market: poor shareholder protection law prevents controlling shareholders from parting with control out of fear of exploitation by a new controlling shareholder who...

We identify important conflicts of interests among shareholders and examine their effects on corporate decisions. When a firm is considering an action that affects other firms in its shareholders' portfolios, shareholders with heterogeneous portfolios may disagree about whether to proceed. This...

This article reports the results of empirical research on the monitoring role of directors' and officers' liability insurance (Damp;O insurance) companies in American corporate governance. Economic theory provides three reasons to expect Damp;O insurers to serve as corporate governance monitors:...

We explore the timing of the replacement of a manager as an important incentive mechanism, using a real options approach in a situation where the timing of the decision to replace the manager is related to a major change in a firm's strategies that involves spending large amounts of various sunk...

Empirical modeling of dividends has been dominated by Lintner (1956). However, Lintner's model suffers from the logical paradox that if companies have target payout ratios then in the steady state the companies will have reached those target payout ratios. Moreover as demon-strated by Bond and...