Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held firms, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an explanation for the use of put and call options, tag-along rights, drag-along rights, demand rights, piggy-back rights, and catch-up...

We provide a direct estimate of the magnitude of agency costs in U.S. publicly-held firms. Using a sample of 1,307 firms in 1992-1997, we compute an explicit performance benchmark that compares a firm’s actual Tobin’s Q to the Q∗ of a hypothetical fully-efficient firm having the same...

We provide a direct estimate of the magnitude of agency costs in publicly held corporations. We compute an explicit performance benchmark that compares a firm's actual Tobin's Q to the Q* of a hypothetical value-maximizing firm having the same inputs and characteristics as the original firm. The...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately held firms, such as joint ventures and venture capital-backed companies. We provide an economic explanation for key clauses in such agreements-namely, put and call options, tag-along and drag-along rights, demand and...

We model owners as solving a multidimensional problem when taking their firms public. Owners can affect the level of underpricing through the choices they make in promoting an issue, such as which underwriter to hire or what exchange to list on. The benefits of reducing underpricing in this way...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held companies, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an economic explanation for the use of put and call options, pre-emption rights, catch-up clauses, drag-along rights, demand rights, and...

Every equilibrium model of IPO underpricing predicts a positive relationship between ex ante uncertainty about firm value and the extent to which entrepreneurs will issue shares at a discount to their subsequent market value. Since ex ante uncertainty is unobservable, the empirical literature...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held firms, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an explanation for the use of put and call options, tag-along rights, drag-along rights, demand rights, piggy-back rights, and catch-up...