Large business enterprises, from the railroad barons of nineteenth century America to Amazon and Google today, are often perceived as important for economic performance and, at the same time, as potential abusers of their political and economic power. In this study, we compare the experiences of...

Concerned with excessive risk-taking, regulators worldwide generally prohibit performance-based fees in pension funds. Presumably, competition can substitute for incentive pay in providing incentives for fund managers to serve their clients' interests. Using a regulatory experiment from Israel,...

We investigate whether cultural differences between professional decision-makers affect financial contracts in a large dataset of international syndicated bank loans. We find that more culturally distant lead banks offer borrowers smaller loans at a higher interest rate and are more likely to...

How do firms that go public decide whether to list on a major stock exchange or locally? Using a unique data set on Israeli IPO?s in the US and Tel Aviv, we show that companies that list in the US are young and overwhelmingly high-tech oriented. We argue that high-quality innovative firms are...

Corporate science in America emerged in the interwar period, as some companies set up state-of-the-art corporate laboratories, hired trained scientists, and embarked upon basic research of the kind we would associate today with academic institutions. Using a newly assembled dataset on U.S....

We compare sources of funds and investment activities of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK using a newly constructed data set. The data provide a rare opportunity to evaluate relations between funds' sources of finance and activities. We find that sources of VC...

Researchers commonly assume that business groups, a ubiquitous organizational form in emerging markets, permit affiliated firms to share risk by smoothing income flows and by reallocating money from one affiliate to another in times of distress. This view has received support in the literature...

This paper analyzes yield spreads on sovereign debt issued by emerging markets using modern data from the 1990s and newly-collected historical data on debt traded in London during 1870-1913, a previous golden era for international capital market integration. Applying several empirical...

This paper analyzes the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders (CFB), an association of British investors holding bonds issued by foreign governments. The CFB played a key role during the heyday of international bond finance, 1870-1913, and in the aftermath of the defaults of the 1930s. It fostered...