Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

This paper investigates under what circumstances boards of directors fire CEOs and whether this action leads to better firm performance. We use unique and detailed data, covering 473 companies in the transition region, on boards’ actions, expectations and beliefs about CEO ability. We find...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

We open up the black box of value creation in private equity with the help of confidential information on value creation plans and their execution. Plans are tailored to each portfolio company's needs and circumstances, have become more hands-on, and vary with deal type, ownership, growth...

We open up the black box of value creation in private equity with the help of confidential information on value creation plans and their execution. Plans are tailored to each portfolio company's needs and circumstances, have become more hands-on, and vary with deal type, ownership, growth...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed 'hard' information about the board's...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly communist countries coupled with detailed “hard” information about the...

Lower underpricing amongst venture-backed IPOs has been attributed to a certification role for venture capitalists. We argue that differences in underpricing per se are uninformative and possibly misleading when not controlling for differences in entrepreneurs` incentives to control...

Using a sample of both U.S. and international IPOs we find evidence of the following: IPO allocation policies favor institutional investors both in the U.S. and worldwide. Constraints on the discretion bankers exercise in the allocation of IPO shares reduce institutional allocations. Constraints...