We model an IPO company's optimal response to the presence of sentiment investors andshort sale constraints. Given regulatory constraints on price discrimination, the optimal mech-anism involves the issuer allocating stock to `regular' institutional investors for subsequentresale to sentiment...

We analyze the choice between public and private equity financing of a unique, hand-collected sample of privately held firms that have indicated their willingness to raise outside equity.(...)

Many financial markets are characterized by strong relationships and networks, rather than arm's-length, spot-market transactions. We examine the performance consequences of this organizational choice in the context of relationships established when VCs syndicate portfolio company investments,...

We investigate directly whether analyst behavior influenced the likelihood of banks winning underwriting mandates for a sample of 16,456 U.S. debt and equity offerings sold between December 1993 and June 2002.(...)

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held firms, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an explanation for the use of put and call options, tag-along rights, drag-along rights, demand rights, piggy-back rights, and catch-up...

We provide a direct estimate of the magnitude of agency costs in U.S. publicly-held firms. Using a sample of 1,307 firms in 1992-1997, we compute an explicit performance benchmark that compares a firm’s actual Tobin’s Q to the Q∗ of a hypothetical fully-efficient firm having the same...