In Morrison v. National Australia Bank (2010), the U.S. Supreme Court limited investors' ability to bring private 10b-5 securities fraud actions to cases where the securities at issue were purchased on a United States stock exchange or were otherwise purchased in the U.S. Because many foreign...

This chapter, written for a Research Handbook on Mergers and Acquisitions (Davidoff-Solomon & Hill, eds.), investigates the widespread claim that the billion dollar valuations of “unicorn” start-ups are unreliable because of the manner in which founders bargain for these valuations with...

We use the term "ratio problem" to describe the omitted variable and measurement error bias that can arise when a ratio is the dependent variable in an economic model. First, we show how bias can arise from the omission of two classes of variables based on a ratio's denominator. As an example,...

This article examines whether the cost of complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) contributed to the rise in going-private transactions after its enactment. Prior studies of this issue generally suffer from a mistaken assumption that by going-private, a publicly-traded firm...

An implicit dichotomy of the corporation exists in legal scholarship. On one side of the dichotomy rests the publicly-held corporation suffering from a significant conflict of interest between its managers and dispersed shareholders; on the other side, the closely-held corporation plagued by...

Discrimination in lending can occur either in face-to-face decisions or in algorithmic scoring. We provide a workable interpretation of the courts' legitimate-business-necessity defense of statistical discrimination. We then estimate the extent of racial/ethnic discrimination in the largest...

We examine how liquidity and return concerns at large mutual funds explain their diminished participation in small IPOs since the late 1990s. Using 5,825 IPOs and portfolio-level information for 37,052 funds, we exploit Russia's 1998 debt default as an exogenous shock to funds' liquidity...

Using an original dataset of fully monetized LBOs initiated from 1990-2006, we examine the emergence of an entrepreneurial transaction strategy focused on revenue growth and its incidence relative to more "classic" strategies focused on operating efficiencies. We additionally show how the...

Economic analysis of corporate takeovers has traditionally advocated legal doctrines that ensure a target company in a takeover contest is acquired by the bidder willing to pay the most for it. The reason stems from the conventional assumption that a bidder's offer price should reflect its...

The disproportionate burden of COVID-19 among communities of color, together with a necessary renewed attention to racial inequalities, have lent new urgency to concerns that algorithmic decision-making can lead to unintentional discrimination against members of historically marginalized groups....