I investigate how women's participation in innovative and regular entrepreneurship responds to a shock to maternity risk. Exploiting the liberalization of an Emergency Contraception Pill in Italy in 2015, combined with spatial variation in access to abortion at the municipality level, I find...

Women's weak bargaining power against spouses can be a hurdle to their entrepreneurship opportunities. By utilizing the state- and time-varying divorce laws in the U.S., we find that female entrepreneurship increases significantly when the divorce laws give women stronger bargaining power. This...

So far, there has been no data set which observes firm formations in Germany not only on a cross-sectional basis using one-time surveys, but continuously over a number of years. Therefore, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), KfW Bankengruppe and Creditreform set up a panel study of...

The phenomena associated with the performance of newly listed companies has increased the interest of many researchers who have developed a vast literature on long-term underpricing and underperformance, which together with hot and cold issue markets, represent the three anomalies that have...

This paper examines the relationship between ownership structures and IPO long-run performance in China. Although entrepreneurial firms underperform the market in general after IPO but the poor performance is mainly caused by the IPOs with ownership control wedge. Entrepreneurial firms with one...

We study the role of a company founder in its internal governance. Using a sample of 484 CEO turnovers for 2000-2015, we establish that CEOs are red for poor performance. However, the likelihood of a poor-performing founder-CEO being fi red is lower than that of an outsider CEO. Moreover, having...

Newly listed firms are more and more active in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As). The ‘stock as currency' motivation explains why firms use publicly traded stocks as acquisition currency after their Initial Public Offering (IPO). We extend its implications by focusing on the role played by stock...

Founder-CEOs invest more in R&D projects. My findings suggest this is an over- investment problem since founder-CEO firms are less able to obtain patents and future citations per patent compared to non-founder CEO firms. Using instrumental variables, I argue that the negative effect of...

Using a unique database of 990 VC-backed Belgian firms, we study whether compatibility between corporate and environmental characteristics matters. We address two questions: (i) Does the interplay of company, industry, and product factors affect the expected returns of the VC-backed firms? (ii)...

We provide evidence that founder CEOs of large S&P 1500 companies are more overconfident than their non-founder counterparts (“professional CEOs”). We approximate overconfidence via CEO tweets, CEO statements during earnings-conference calls, management-earnings forecasts, and CEO...