Size and book-to-market equity (BM) strongly explain stock returns’ cross section; the risk they capture is the relative distress of small and value stocks. This study examines the default risk’s pricing power, measured by U.S. firms’ market-revealed credit-default-swap premiums...

We document that ethnicity is a major determinant of how founders of U.S. startup companies match with partners of U.S. VC firms. A shared ethnicity increases the likelihood that a VC firm invests in a startup, strengthens the degree of the VC firm’s involvement, increases the size and scope...

We employ spatial econometrics techniques to investigate to what extentcountries’ economic and geographical relations affect their stock market comovements.We propose an econometric model that is particularly suitable for financial data, where common time trends prevail. In general, among the...

Existing literature highlights opportunistic behavior as the main reason why rational agents underinvest in relationship-specific assets (the hold-up problem). However, a supplier would also be reluctant to undertake relationship-specific investment if she cannot observe financial stability or...

Previous research has shown that firms identified as derivative users tend to be valued at a premium relative to non-users. In this paper I develop the hypothesis that the ‘derivative premium’ is higher in firms with centralized FX exposure management, compared to a decentralized approach in...

Current models for predicting volatility do not incorporate information flow and are solely based on historical volatilities. We suggest a method to quantify the semantic content of words in news articles about a company and use this as a predictor of its stock volatility. The results show that...

We combine a novel measure of export-related financial needs at the product level with a unique database of firm-product export data from five developing countries. Using the tools of survival analysis and controlling for firm and products fixed effects, we then examine the impact of financial...

This study reports findings from the first large scale experiment investigating whether entrepreneurs differ from other people in their willingness to expose themselves to various forms of uncertainty in decision on tasks. A stratified random sample of 700 CEOs from the Yangzi delta region in...

In this paper we revisit the contentious issue of whether corporate governance arrangements influence corporate cash holdings. We use the exogenous cash windfalls in the oil industry during the 2000s to test the power of three governance dimensions (managerial entrenchment, board independence...

An increasing body of literature discusses how and to which extent the financial crisis of 2007-2009 transmits to the real economy. This paper investigates the impact of the financial crisis of 2007-2009 on corporate investment, in particular research and development (R&D) expenditures. We...