Firms have inefficiently low incentives to innovate when other firms benefit from their inventions and the innovating firm therefore does not capture the full surplus of its innovations. We show that common ownership of firms mitigates this impediment to corporate innovation. By contrast,...

We provide new facts about the cross-section and evolution of mergers and acquisitions for U.S. public firms. Using a general equilibrium model with a hedonic demand system and data on institutional ownership, we document that mergers are increasingly concentrated among firm pairs with a high...

We document a secular shift from IPOs to acquisitions of venture capital-backed startups and show that this trend is accompanied by an increase in the opportunity cost of going public over the last quarter century. Dominant companies that are disproportionately active in the corporate control...

How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a model of Bayesian persuasion in which the Receiver can detect lies with positive probability. We show that the Sender lies more when the lie detection probability increases. As...

We study the welfare implications of the rise of common ownership in the United States from 1994 to 2018. We build a general equilibrium model with a hedonic demand system in which firms compete in a network game of oligopoly. Firms are connected through two large networks: the first reflects...