New government spending must be approved by a referendum of citizens in many Swiss cantons. This decisionmaking procedure seems like a simple way to address citizen-legislator agency problems, but little systematic evidence is available concerning its effect on spending outcomes. We estimate...

This paper studies the conditions under which the proxy advice market helps and hinders corporate governance. A key assumption is that investors are heterogeneous, with some focusing only on returns while others also have nonpecuniary goals, such as environmental sustainability and protection of...

This paper studies announcement returns in a sample of 3,667 mergers over the last 55 years in order to shed light on the causes of the waning of corporate diversification. The abnormal combined (acquirer + target) return from diversifying mergers declined over time, consistent with the idea...

This paper studies the announcement returns associated with diversifying mergers from 1950 to 2002. It is widely believed that corporate diversification destroys value, but we find that combined (acquirer + target) announcement returns were significantly positive for diversifying mergers...

This article develops a dynamic model of a firm in which diversification can be a value-maximizing strategy even if specialization is generally efficient. The central idea is that firms are comprised of organizational capabilities that can be profitable in multiple businesses and that...

This paper tests whether state and local fiscal policy depended on the number of seats in the legislature in the first half of the 20th century. We find that large legislatures spent more, as implied by the quot;Law of 1/nquot; from the fiscal commons/logrolling literature. The same relation...

This paper explores the benefits and costs of the voter initiative, a direct democracy device that allows voters to make policy decisions without involving their elected representatives. Previous research suggests that by introducing quot;competitionquot; into the proposal process, the...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that tough antitrust enforcement in the 1960s led firms to engage in diversification programs by preventing them from growing within their own industries. If true, diversification should have occurred more often when large firms merged than when small firms...

This paper compares the fiscal policy of initiative and non-initiative states in the first half of the 20th century. States with initiatives had higher combined state and local expenditure after controlling for income and other demographics, but a lower ratio of state to local expenditure. This,...

This paper surveys the extensive literature that seeks to estimate the effect of the initiative and referendum on public policy. The evidence on the referendum uniformly finds that requiring voter approval for new spending (or new debt) results in lower spending (or lower debt). The initiative...