Comprehensive firm-level data for Polish manufacturing show that in state-owned firms the large drop in net employment since the start of the transition in 1990 has been driven by a jump in the job destruction rate; job creation, by contrast, is located disproportionately in the private sector. Small firms are more dynamic than large firms, but even after controlling for size, private firms hav...

This paper considers the private and public incentives for firms to merge in the face of foreign entry. We set up a standard linear Cournot model of competition within a country and consider the gains to two merging firms and to national welfare in a series of scenarios: homogeneous and heterogeneous firms with and without synergies from mergers. We look first at optimal domestic firm numbers f...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to document the use and the diffusion of the “new” compensation and work organisation practices in Danish private sector firms and second, to examine how and why firms differ regarding the adoption of different schemes. The analysis is based on a detailed mail questionnaire answered by 1,600 Danish private sector firms. JEL Codes: J33, J41, L23

In many countries infrastructure liberalization proceeded faster than the privatization of former state monopolies. Regulatory agencies, established to oversee the transition and safeguard the preconditions for competition, therefore monitor state-owned firms in addition to privately owned firms. The research on public-private firms has generated heterogeneous findings, with some pointing to th...

Using a large firm-level panel dataset from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, we examine the effect of financial distortions on FDI inflows in China’s labor-intensive industries. Following Whited and Wu (2006), we estimate the investment Euler equation and construct a financing constraint index for each firm. We find that among domestic firms, the financing constraint index is highest ...

In the late 1990s, China’s industrial sector was dominated by state-owned firms. We document how this changed after 1998. More than 80 percent of the state-owned firms in 1998 were shut down or privatized by 2007. Among firms we classify as state-controlled in 2007, many were restructured and registered as private firms with a controlling share held by a stateowned conglomerate or were new firm...

We investigate the decisions of listed firms to go private once again. We start by revealing that while a significant number of firms which go public is VC-backed, an overproportional share of these VC-backed firms go private later on (they stay on the exchange for an average of 8.5 years). We interpret this very robust pattern such that IPOs of VC-backed firms are to a large extent a temporary...

The main purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of the corporate choice between different forms of debt financing. By analyzing the most comprehensive sample of U.S. corporate debt issues to date, I find that firms that issue 144A debt have significantly lower credit quality and higher information asymmetry than firms that issue traditional non-bank private debt. Further, the stud...

Firms often lack knowledge of the nature of the uncertainty they or their opponents face and use heuristics or approximations to determine their strategy. We define and analyze one type of "heuristic strategy", in which firms choose strategies based on the expectation of their opponents’ private information rather than the full information about the distribution of that private information. We ...

We provide one of the first large sample comparisons of cash policies in public and private U.S. firms. We first show that despite higher financing frictions, private firms hold, on average, about half as much cash as public firms do. By examining the drivers of cash policies for each group, we are able to attribute the difference to the much higher agency costs in public firms. By combining ev...