Employing a sample of 5,858 U.S. public firms from 1993 to 2017, this study documents robust evidence that firms that hold more trademarks enjoy a lower cost of equity, even after we control for other determinants of the cost of equity and industry-by-year fixed effects. To address endogeneity...

This paper studies the relationship between a firm's pre-IPO trademarks and its IPO underpricing. Using 4,321 US IPOs during the period 1980-2016, we find that firms with a larger number of trademarks prior to the IPO date experience significantly less IPO underpricing. We employ a quasi-natural...

Using the passage of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act (FTDA) as an exogenous shock to trademark protection, we find that stronger trademark protection induces firms to increase their CEO risk-taking incentives as measured by CEO portfolio vega. The effect is greater for firms facing more...