Agency Theory as the dominant view of Corporate Governance disregards that the key task of firm governance is to generate, accumulate, transfer, and protect firm specific knowledge. Three different foundations to the theory of the firm which underpin different concepts of corporate governance are discussed: The traditional view of the firm as a nexus of contracts, the view of the firm as a nexu...

The life-cycle theory of consumption draws a well-established distinction between the implications for consumption of changes in wealth perceived to be of a “transitory” as opposed to a “permanent” nature. In this paper, using a unique combination of regulatory and survey micro-data, we examine the importance of the life-cycle theory, in estimating housing wealth effects for the Irish mortgage ...

We study the investment and nancing policies of public U.S. rms. Large rms substitute between debtand equity nancing over the business cycle whereas small rms' nancing policy for debt and equity is pro-cyclical. This paper proposes a novel mechanism that explains these cyclical patterns in a quantitative heterogeneous rm industry model with endogenous rm dynamics. We nd that cross-sectional di ...