In this paper, we argue that managers confront a paradox in selecting strategy. On one hand, capital markets systematically discount uniqueness in the strategy choices of firms. Uniqueness in strategy heightens the cost of collecting and analyzing information to evaluate a firm's future value....

We develop a novel metric of environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) rivalry capturing the sustainability engagements of a firm relative to its “green” and “toxic” peers. We document that our measure has superior predictive power about firms' future pollution levels when...

This online appendix provides additional results as described in our paper "Staggered Boards and Long-Term Value, Revisited", available at 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2364165' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2364165

Technological uniqueness, defined as the degree to which a firm’s patented technologies differ from its industry competitors, has an unclear relationship with firm performance. On the one hand, recent empirical work in economics suggests that technological uniqueness can act as a barrier to...

Growth equity (GE) funds have emerged as the third major private equity asset class for investors, alongside venture capital (VC) and buyout (B/O) funds, and as an important new source of external equity capital for private companies and entrepreneurs wishing to fund growth without surrendering...

We create a novel dataset to examine the nature and determinants of dual-class IPOs. We document that dual-class firms have different types of controlling shareholders and wedges between voting and economic rights. We find that the founders' wedge is largest when founders have stronger...

We analyze the link between creditor rights and firms' investment policies, proposing that stronger creditor rights in bankruptcy reduce corporate risk-taking. In cross-country analysis, we find that stronger creditor rights induce greater propensity of firms to engage in diversifying...

We analyze the impact of the right to adopt a poison pill – a “shadow pill” – on visible pill policy and firm value by exploiting the quasi-natural experiment provided by U.S. states’ staggered adoption of poison pill laws (PPLs) validating the pill. We document that by reducing...