Volume 1A covers corporate finance: how businesses allocate capital - the capital budgeting decision - and how they obtain capital - the financing decision. Though managers play no independent role in the work of Miller and Modigliani, major contributions in finance since then have shown that...

In the 11 articles in this first of two parts, top scholars summarize and analyze recent scholarship in corporate finance. Covering subjects from corporate taxes to behavioral corporate finance and econometric issues, their articles reveal how specializations resonate with each other and...

Lifecycle theories of mergers and diversification predict that firms make acquisitions and diversify when their internal growth opportunities become exhausted. Free cash flow theories make similar predictions. In contrast to these theories, we find that the acquisition rate of firms (defined as...

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

From 1990 to 2011, the share of world IPO activity by non-U.S. firms increased because of financial globalization and because of a decrease in U.S. IPO activity. Financial globalization reduces the impact of national institutions on domestic IPO activity and enables more non-U.S. firms from...

This paper investigates Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deregistrations by foreign firms from the time the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed in 2002 through 2008. We test two theories, the bonding theory and the loss of competitiveness theory, to understand why foreign firms leave...

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

From 1990 to 2011, the share of the world's initial public offering (IPO) activity outside the U.S. increased with financial globalization. In the 1990s, when financial globalization was lower, there were 0.37 U.S. IPOs for each non-U.S. IPO compared to only 0.12 in the 2000s. Consistent with...

Some argue too-big-to-fail (TBTF) status increases the value of the largest banks. In contrast, we find that the value of the largest banks is negatively related to asset size in normal times, but not during the financial crisis when TBTF status was most valuable. Further, shareholders lose when...

We find that the announcement gain to target shareholders from acquisitions is significantly lower if private firm instead of a public firm makes the acquisition. Non-operating firms like private equity funds make the majority of private bidder acquisitions. On average, target shareholders...