This paper provides theory and evidence relating information asymmetries and agency costs to exit outcomes in venture capital backed entrepreneurial firms. Where venture capitalists are able to better mitigate information asymmetries and agency costs faced by the new owners of the firm, they...

Becker and Fuest (forthcoming) provides a new explanation for the important and puzzling link between limited liability and corporate taxation. The authors argue that a corporate tax on all entrepreneurs with limited liability is optimal when entrepreneurs can offset potential losses and when...

In this paper, we examine the relation between government ownership and stock price informativeness around the world. Using a sample of privatized firms from 41 countries between 1983 and 2007, we find strong and robust evidence that state ownership is associated with lower firm-level stock...

Purpose – Audit rotation is a key policy initiative implemented in global jurisdictions to deal with concerns about audit quality. Auditing financial reports involves communicating attested value-relevant company information to investors, hence audit quality plays a role in the quality of...

We examine the optimal financing of infrastructure when governments have limited financial commitment and can expropriate rents from private sector firms that manage infrastructure. While private firms need incentives to implement projects well, governments need incentives to limit...

We show that stock-based CEO compensation can create a "race to the bottom" among firms that escalates short-termist pressure. More informative stock prices reduce the agency cost of incentivizing managers. Also, shortening a firm's project maturity improves stock price informativeness by...

Bank loans have an increasing role for corporate activities. In most countries, bank loans are the main source of financing for small and medium-sized enterprises. Even though the role of banks decreased in the last years, banks take advantage of a privileged position which allows them to...

When designing schemes to help SMEs survive crises, the government typically faces asymmetric information, so that it cannot target the SMEs most worth saving. We show that the government can exploit the information in the borrower loan demand to improve policy targets compared with existing...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting empirical results in the literature concerning the relation between loan risk and collateral. Specifically, we posit that different economic characteristics or types of collateral pledges may be associated with the empirical dominance...