Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately held firms, such as joint ventures and venture capital-backed companies. We provide an economic explanation for key clauses in such agreements-namely, put and call options, tag-along and drag-along rights, demand and...

We provide a direct estimate of the magnitude of agency costs in publicly held corporations. We compute an explicit performance benchmark that compares a firm's actual Tobin's Q to the Q* of a hypothetical value-maximizing firm having the same inputs and characteristics as the original firm. The...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately held firms, such as joint ventures and venture capital-backed companies. We provide an economic explanation for key clauses in such agreements—namely, put and call options, tag-along and drag-along rights, demand and...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately held firms, such as joint ventures and venture capital-backed companies. We provide an economic explanation for key clauses in such agreements—namely, put and call options, tag-along and drag-along rights, demand and...

This paper shows that dominant firms may wish to encourage competition in vertically-related markets. It shows that firms' incentives to vertically integrate other firms depends on the competitive environment.

We analyze the implications of entrepreneurial spawning for a variety of rm characteristics such as size, focus, profitability, and innovativeness. We examine the dynamics of spawning over time. Our model accounts for much of the empirical evidence relating to the relation between spawning and...

We investigate the suitability of securitization as an alternative to reinsurance for the purpose of transferring natural catastrophe risk. We characterize the conditions under which one or the other form of risk transfer dominates using a setting in which reinsurers and traders in financial...

We analyze two firms’ choice between merging, allying, and trading assets. We consider a setting in which firms have assets, skills, and core capabilities; skills are the component of organizational capital that increases in the course of joint operations, core capabilities the component that...

We analyze the implications of the decision to spawn or to retain a new product for the nature and evolution of the firm. In our model, a new product is spawned if the fit between the product and its parent firm organization is not adequate. We focus on the impact of the firm's history of...

When information is costly, a seller may wish to prevent prospective buyers from acquiring information, for the cost of information acquisition is ultimately borne by the seller. A seller can achieve the desired prevention of information acquisition through posted-price selling, by offering...