We evaluate the link between CEO industry tournament incentives (ITI) and the product market benefits of corporate liquidity. We find that ITI increase the level and marginal value of cash holdings. Furthermore, ITI strengthen the relation between excess cash and market share gains especially...

How do innovative firms react when existing products experience negative shocks? We explore this question with detailed project-level data from drug development firms. Using FDA Public Health Advisories as idiosyncratic negative shocks to approved drugs, we first examine how drug makers react...

This paper analyses the relationship between the rule of law (RoL) and intangible capital investment by businesses within a sample of 16 European countries, over the period from 1996 to 2017. Studies on the effects of RoL on intangible capital investment are scarce, hence, the relevance of...

We propose a model that starts from the premise that intangible capital needs to be stored on some medium --- software, patents, essential employees --- before it can be utilized in production. Storage implies that intangible capital may be partially non-rival within the firm, leading to scale...

Abstract We study the classical relationship between a firm’s investment and Tobin’s q for which unobserved productivity is another factor of a firm’s decision. Besides the potential measurement problem of Tobin’s q, controlling unobserved productivity is a new challenge. We develop an...

This paper examines how the similarity between the executive compensation leverage ratio and the firm leverage ratio affects the quality of the firm’s investment decisions. A larger leverage gap (i.e., a bigger difference between these two ratios) leads to more investment distortions. Managers...

We investigate the effect of CEO inside debt (i.e. pension benefits and deferred compensation) on firms' asset tangibility and investment. Asset tangibility is measured by Property, Plant and Equipment, Asset Tangibility (Berger, Ofek and Swary, 1996), and tangible assets. Our findings are...

We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk...

Traditional finance theory suggests that riskier investments should yield higher returns. Challenging this notion, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that highly-incented managers may take on excessive risk, leading to greater losses, while other theoretical research argues that high...

Nepotism emerges in a multiplicity of contexts from political assignments to firm hiring decisions, but what are its real effects on the economy? This paper explores how nepotism affects corporate investment. To measure nepotism, we build a unique dataset of family connections among individuals...