Section 1 presents tests for the hypothesis that shifts in technology and industry composition might have played a key role in causing the U.S. listing gap. We replicate our core analysis at the industry level and find no evidence that the dynamics of the number of listing is driven by industry...

The abnormal decline in the number of US public firms is often blamed on merger activity, private equity investments, and stock market regulations. We compare and quantify the effects of these channels on the evolution of the US listing gap in a unified framework. In the US, an extra 100 mergers...

Using a sample of 1,593 US firms that go public between 1990 and 2007, we find that VC-backed IPOs experience less financial distress risk post-offering than do comparable non-VC-backed IPOs. After controlling for endogeneity, we find this is related to the screening done by VC-investors, who...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 1993 to 2007. We find that the level of cash holdings declines as state ownership increases. This negative relation is attributable to the soft-budget constraint (SBC) inherent in state...

We investigate the effect of government share ownership on the cost of corporate debt. Government ownership could carry an implicit debt guarantee reducing the chance of default and leading to a lower cost of debt. On the other hand, government ownership could lead to a higher cost of debt if...

Motivated by the recent rise of state capitalism, this paper investigates the effects of government ownership on market valuations across a sample of publicly listed corporations from East Asia. We find strong, robust evidence that government-owned firms exhibit higher market valuation than...

This study surveys the literature examining the privatization of state-owned enterprises(SOEs). We overview the history of privatization, the theoretical and empirical evidence on the relative performance of state owned and privately owned firms, the types of privatization, if and by how much...

This study compares the SEO activity of young dual- and single-class firms. Because they hold stock with superior voting rights, dual-class insiders weigh different costs and benefits when issuing equity. Most importantly, the marginal dilution of voting power resulting from an SEO is lower in...

We review and bridge the literature on the internationalization of state-owned firms and sovereign wealth funds to provide a novel understanding of how governments’ nonbusiness objectives affect foreign investments. We explain how governments as foreign investors behave differently from...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 2000 to 2012. We find that the level of cash holdings increases as state ownership declines. For the average firm in our sample, a 10 percentage-point decline in state ownership leads to...