Empire-building by managers implies that they use a lower effective discount rate in making investment decisions. We use actual investment decisions to measure the gap between the manager’s effective discount rate and the market rate. Our empirical work is based on panel data for 193 Canadian...

The two key questions which motivate our work are: do bubbles exist (in the sense that stock market prices do not always correspond to the present value of expected future profitability) and, if bubbles exist, do they have an effect on business fixed investment? The case of Japan is particularly...

The value of the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital (ó) is a "crucial" assumption in the study of factor incomes (e.g., Piketty (2014a), Piketty and Zucman (forthcoming), Karabarbounis and Neiman (2014)) and long-run growth (Solow, 1956). This paper begins by examining the...

Bank intermediated finance has been cited frequently as the preferred means for channeling funds from savers to firms. Germany is the prototypical economy where universal banks allegedly exert substantial influence over firms. Despite frequent assertions about the considerable power of German...

By studying the gap between the discount rates used by executives and shareholders, we assess the extent to which governance problems distort firm behavior. The estimation strategy recovers discount rates used by executives from the pattern of their actual investment spending. Our empirical work...

The transmission channels through which monetary policy affects business investment remain opaque. This paper examines the importance of the interest rate and credit channels on business fixed investment in Germany. We have at our disposal three uniquely rich datasets -- a panel of financial...

The Berle-Means problem - information and incentive asymmetries disrupting relations between knowledgeable managers and remote investors - has remained a durable issue engaging researchers since the 1930's. However, the Berle-Means paradigm - widely-dispersed, helpless investors facing strong,...

The adoption of takeover protections, from the empirical side, has been focused to find supporting evidence to the entrenchment hypothesis or to the shareholder value hypothesis. The expected result is a negative impact on shareholder wealth when decisions for additional takeover defenses are...