An intense debate on the use of limited-voting shares developed in the UK during the 1950s. Using a unique hand-collected dataset, we show that negative news coverage of limited-voting shares is associated with an increase in the relative price of voting and limited-voting shares (the voting...

We investigate whether cultural differences between professional decision-makers affect financial contracts in a large dataset of international syndicated bank loans. We find that lead banks offer smaller loans at a higher interest rate to more culturally distant borrowers. Furthermore, lead...

Sweden offers a unique natural experiment to analyze the microeconomic effects of institutionalized saving on ownership structure, corporate governance and performance of listed companies. First, the Swedish pension reform increased the participation of pension funds in the domestic stock market...

Casual observation suggests that capital allocation is often driven by favouritism and connections rather than by market mechanisms and information on future expected returns. We investigate when favouritism or markets emerge as an equilibrium outcome in the allocation of capital. We show that...

In the nineties, average firm size decreased, organisations decentralized, and workers preferences shifted from large to small firms. Our model identifies the economic forces behind this trend. Small firms with little capital at risk are subject to risk-shifting. They realize more of their...

I review the empirical and theoretical literature on trade credit and identify two main strands of the literature, which focus, respectively, on expensive trade credit to financially constrained firms and on cheap trade credit to customers with high bargaining power. It emerges that trade credit...

We show that the availability of finance affects firms not only through financial markets, but also through the labour market. In our model, talented workers care for realizing their ideas because this can increase their lifetime income, but they also wish to be insured against income risk....

This paper analyzes workers' choices to sort in large and small firms. Workers care to realize their ideas as they share the associated benefits with the firm. Small firms being less capitalized are more inclined to realize their workers' risky ideas, but better capitalized firms provide safe...

This paper shows that the quality of laws, by affecting the cost of investment for outside investors, has an effect on risk sharing and, through it, on the availability of external finance to firms. If, because of high investment costs, the provision of finance to projects is concentrated in few...

This paper investigates the relation between financial development and firm size. The model shows that the quality of laws, by affecting the level of monitoring costs, has an effect on risk sharing and, through this channel, on the investor basis and the availability of external finance to...