The unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic has sparked a new debate on the merits of markets vs. states for addressing acute societal crises. While some argue that market forces are imperative to stimulate increased supply of critical products and services, others contend that dealing with the pandemic...

The spread of investments by sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) around the world has raised questions about what determines their location choices. We argue that SWFs, like multinational companies, consider a host of cross-country distance factors to guide their location decisions and that the effect...

The wave of liberalization that swept world markets in the 1980s and 90s altered the ways that governments manage their economies. Reinventing State Capitalism analyzes the rise of new species of state capitalism in which governments interact with private investors either as majority or minority...

We study if CEOs and their backgrounds matter for the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) exploiting the fact that these companies had different CEOs (with different backgrounds) in different moments in time. We construct a database of Brazilian SOEs between 1973 and 1993 and make...

There is a growing literature comparing the performance of private vs. state-owned companies. Yet, there is little work examining the effects of having the government as a minority shareholder of private companies. We conduct such a study using data for 296 publicly-traded corporations in...

There is growing interest in how governments shape industries and influence firm performance. Using a database of 296 firms traded on the São Paulo stock exchange between 1995 and 2003, we find having BNDES (the Brazilian National Development Bank) as a minority owner to increase firms' return...