Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization around the world in recent decades. How do these assets perform post-privatization? This paper examines global airports. Our central finding is that the type of ownership matters: Volume, efficiency, and quality improve substantially...

Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization in recent decades. How do different types of owners target and manage these assets? And does the contract form--control rights (concession) vs. outright ownership (sale)--matter? We explore these questions in the context of global...

This essay reviews Bebchuk and Fried's Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. Bebchuk and Fried criticize the standard view of executive compensation, in which executives negotiate contracts with shareholders that provide incentives that motivate them to...

Managers often claim that an important source of value in acquisitions is the acquiring firm's ability to finance investments for the target firm. This claim implies that targets are financially constrained prior to being acquired and that these constraints are eased following the acquisition....

Uncertainty about management appears to affect firms' cost of borrowing and financial policies. In a sample of S&P 1500 firms between 1987 and 2010, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all decline over the first three years of CEO tenure, holding other macroeconomic, firm, and...

When there is uncertainty about a CEO's quality, news about the firm causes rational investors to update their expectation of the firm's value for two reasons: Updates occur because of the direct effect of the news, and also because news leads investors to update their assessment of the CEO's...

Managers often claim that an important source of value in acquisitions is the acquiring firm's ability to finance investments for the target firm. This claim implies that targets are financially constrained prior to being acquired and that these constraints are eased following the acquisition....

This paper documents the existence of a CEO Investment Cycle, in which disinvestment decreases over CEO tenure while investment increases, leading to “cyclical” firm growth in assets as well as in employment. The estimated variation in investment rate over the CEO cycle is of the same order...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the financial structure of large recent buyouts. We collect detailed information of the financings of 153 large buyouts (averaging over $1 billion in enterprise value). We document the manner in which these important transactions are financed. Buyout...

An objective of many proposed corporate governance reforms is increased transparency. This goal has been relatively uncontroversial, as most observers believe increased transparency to be unambiguously good. We argue that, from a corporate governance perspective, there are likely to be both...