We present a dynamic model of venture capital financing, described as a sequential investment problem with uncertain outcome. Each venture has a critical, but unknown threshold beyond which it cannot progress. If the threshold is reached before the completion of the project, then the project...

A manager's shareholders, board of directors, and potential future employers are continually assessing his ability. A rich literature has documented that this insight has profound implications for corporate governance because assessment generates incentives (good and bad), introduces assorted...

The level of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay responds asymmetrically to good and bad news about the CEO's ability. The average CEO captures approximately half of the surpluses from good news, implying CEOs and shareholders have roughly equal bargaining power. In contrast, the average CEO bears...

We directly study the information gathering process around a merger announcement by using the IP addresses accessing Form 8-K filings for merger agreements. This allows us to measure who pays attention to the announcement, how attention varies across mergers, and if this attention is related to...

This paper shows that an acquirer's learning speed about target managerial entrenchment determines the effectiveness of hostile takeovers as disciplining devices. In a dynamic setting, an acquirer keeps collecting information about the degree of target managerial entrenchment and thereby learns...

In an economy where growth is determined by the interaction of R&D and learning-by-doing (LBD), changes of factors that stimulate either one of these activities affect growth differently than in an economy where growth is determined by either R&D or LBD alone. In particular, when firms...

This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on learning by doing. Many of the distinctive theoretical implications of learning by doing have been derived under the assumption that the cost–quantity relationships observed in numerous empirical studies are largely the result of...

In an economy where growth is determined by the interaction of R&D and learning-by-doing (LBD), changes of factors that stimulate either one of these activities affect growth differently than in an economy where growth is determined by either R&D or LBD alone. In particular, when firms...

Uncertainty faced by individual firms appears to be heterogeneous. In this paper, I construct new empirical measures of firm-level uncertainty using data from the I/B/E/S and Compustat. These new measures reveal persistent differences in the degree of uncertainty facing individual firms not...

In this paper we present an inter-temporal optimization problem of a representative R&D firm that simultaneously invests in horizontal and vertical innovations. We posit that learning-by-doing makes the process of quality improvements a positive function of the number of existing technologies...