We show that firms in industries in which firm-specific stock price variation is larger use more external financing and allocate capital with greater precision in the sense that their marginal q ratios are closer to one. According to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, greater firm-specific stock...

Savings increasingly flow to low-cost index funds, which simply buy and hold the stocks in a major index, such as the S&P 500. Increased indexing impedes incorporation of idiosyncratic information into stock prices. We limit endogeneity bias by showing that exogenous idiosyncratic currency...

The Common Law, parliamentary democracy, and academia all institutionalize dissent to check undue obedience to authority; and corporate governance reformers advocate the same in boardrooms. Many corporate governance disasters could be averted if directors asked hard questions, demanded clear...

Because positive spillovers give investment in innovation a social rate of return several times higher than its internal rate of return to innovators, innovation is chronically underfunded. Recurrent manias, panics, and crashes in stock markets inundate “hot” new technologies with capital....

We examine the value of multinationality to investors as reflected in firms' q ratios. The positive impact of research and development and advertising spending on a firm's q is enhanced by multinationality, but multinationality itself has no significant impact. This supports the internalization...