The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the interaction between hedging, financing, and investment decisions. This work is relevant in that theoretical predictions are not necessarily identical to those in the case where only two decisions are being made. We argue that the way in which hedging affects the firms’ financing and investing decisions differs for firms with different ...

We show that firms with chief executive officers (CEOs) who gain general managerial skills over their lifetime work experience invest more in R&D and produce more patents. We address the potential endogenous CEO-firm matching bias using firmand CEOfixed effects and variation in the enforceability of non-compete agreements across states and over time during the CEO’s career. Our findings suggest...

This paper examines the relationship between ownership structure, analyst coverage, and forecast error for the entire population of non-financial companies listed on the Swiss Exchange for the period 2003-2013. The results show a negative association between concentrated ownership and analyst coverage for both family firms and firms held by a nonfamily blockholder. Furthermore, forecasts of ana...

We examine the interaction between risk (uncertainty) and production efficiency in determining pay-performance sensitivity in optimal executive compensation. Particularly, we show that the risk-incentive trade-off is exacerbated (attenuated) as production efficiency increases when the efficiency level is greater (less) than the level of compensation risk. This result suggests that the optimalit...

Is market-based or bank-based financial system better for fostering technological innovation as an engine of growth? I present evidence that bank-based systems promote rapid technological progress in those industrial sectors that depend heavily on external finance for funding innovation by facilitating credit access to younger firms. On the other hand, I also find evidence of a general positive...

Together with a sense of entering a New Economy, the US experienced in the second half of the 1990s an economic expansion, a stock market boom, a financing boom for new firms and productivity gains. In this paper, we propose an interpretation of these events within a general equilibrium model with financial frictions and decreasing returns to scale in production. We show that the mere prospect ...

Owner-managers of private companies are often highly underdiversified. We investigate the consequences of underdiversification at the company level. Information on US companies and their owner-managers is obtained from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of Small Business Finances. Underdiversification, measured as the share of the owner-manager’s net worth invested in the company, h...

I test theories of the recent financial crisis by studying how banks’ pre-crisis investments connect to their CEOs’ beliefs. Using different proxies for beliefs, I find banks with larger housing investments and worse crisis performance had CEOs who were more optimistic ex ante. Banks with the most optimistic CEOs experienced 20 percentage points higher real estate loan growth, and 15 percentage...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building. We test this result with a laboratory experiment. We find that, when the problem of product market opportunism is moderate, i.e., reputation formation equilibri...

The paper explores factors that lead to accumulation or decumulation of firms’ cash reserves. In particular, we empirically examine whether additional future fixed capital and R&D investment expenditures induce firms to change their liquidity ratio while considering the role of market imperfections. Implementing a dynamic framework on a panel of US, UK and German firms, we find that firms in al...