This paper examines strategic interactions between venture capitalists (VCs) and top underwriters in the IPO process. We test two contrasting hypotheses: certification and rent extraction. On the one hand, the joint involvement of VCs and top underwriters can amplify their certification effect,...

Corporate limited liability can create agency conflicts between the public and private sectors. The resulting distortion may induce overinvestment in risky technologies relative to the social optimum. This paper examines the role of a well-designed corporate tax structure in aligning private...

This paper investigates the design of privatization mechanisms in emerging market economies. We identify an emerging market economy by the political constraints that limit the set of viable privatization mechanisms. Our objective is to explain the striking diversity of privatization mechanisms...

Permanent or long-term large shareholders have different governance incentives and mechanisms from institutional investors. Liquidity could facilitate either cutting and running by large shareholders or, alternatively, increased monitoring. Using an exogenous shock to liquidity in China, we...

The effect of corporate governance may depend on a firm's financial slack. On one hand, financial slack may be spent by managers for their private benefits; a high level is likely associated with severe agency conflicts. Thus corporate governance matters more for high financial slack firms...

We model the vulnerability of an economy to a financial crisis as arising from the interaction of the degree of economic specialization and the intermediated financing of the investment opportunities. The probability of a financial crisis is shown to increase in the degree of economic...

Employing the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA) that mandates, all patent applications are to be published within 18 months after filing, as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that accelerated patent disclosure increases stock price crash risk. This effect is stronger when treated...

We investigate the effect of fiduciary duty of loyalty on corporate culture measured by a novel machine learning approach. We apply a difference-in-differences method exploiting the staggered adoption of the Corporate Opportunity Waiver (COW) law in the U.S. states as an exogenous decline in the...

We investigate the effect of shareholder litigation risk on corporate culture. We measure corporate culture by a novel machine learning metric following Li et al. (2021). Exploiting exogenous declines in shareholder litigation rights and derivative lawsuit risk following the staggered adoption...

Prior research has often taken the view that entrenched managers tend to avoid debt. Contrary to this view, we find that firms with entrenched managers, as measured by the Gompers et al. (2003) governance index, use more debt finance and have higher leverage ratios. To address the potential...