How did the crisis impact financial intermediation? We address this question by studying a unique market segment, viz. foreign private debt issued in the U.S, which grew in size despite the financial crisis. Specifically foreign private (or Rule 144A) debt issued in U.S. registered over a five-fold increase compared to public (or Yankee) debt between pre-crisis and crisis periods, while at the ...

We study a proprietary dataset detailing the terms of over 1,000 sales transactions to 218 firms by a mechanics importer in an Asian country. Kickbacks are commons: 85 firms demand cash kickbacks in order to make a purchase. We find government firms to be the most corrupt, requiring kickbacks 47% of the time. However, private domestic firms are not free of corruption, with 32% requiring kickbac...

This paper describes the process of privatization of China’s Township Enterprises. Findings from a recent field survey by the authors show how far privatization has proceeded and how it has affected firm performance. The pervasiveness and impact of privatization are readily apparent. The privatization in the mid-1990s was deep and fundamental. More than 50% of local government-owned firms have ...

In many economies, small and medium-sized firms have no direct access to the financial markets but depend on bank loans. In the market for bank loans, competition is often distorted by state banks enjoying lower funding costs than private banks due to a state guarantee on their liabilities. In this paper, we argue that if the state bank’s guarantee is tied to an obligation to renegotiate loans ...

This paper presents empirical evidence on firms’ decisions to cooperate in R&D and the extent to which government sponsored R&D programs increase cooperation. Using a sample of firms from the Spanish innovation survey we jointly estimate the determinants of firm participation in R&D programs and of choice of cooperation partners. We find that (i) firms participating in national and European pro...

Environmental activists are increasingly resorting to private strategies such as boycotts and protests focused on changing individual firms’ behavior. In this paper, we examine activists’ use of such “private politics” to engender firm compliance with activist objectives. We begin by developing a simple theoretical model of an activist campaign from which we develop a set of empirical hypothese...

this paper is concerned with the estimation of frontier production function to measure the technical efficiency for iranian textile companies during 1995. the objective of this estimation is to investigate if there are any differences in the technical efficiency between the private and public firms as well as the relationship between technical efficiency and size of textile companies in iran. a...

Knowledge-based firms seeking competitive advantage often draw on the public knowledge stream – ideas embedded in public commons institutions – as the foundation for private knowledge – ideas firms protect through private intellectual property (IP) institutions. However, we have a limited understanding of the converse relationship: the impact of private knowledge strategies on public knowledge ...

Abstract Despite the prevalence of private equity (PE) buyouts firms, little is known about how these transactions create value. We provide evidence that PE acquirers disproportionately target firms with weak operating profitability and those have growth potential but are highly levered dependent on external financing. Target grow rapidly post-buyout, especially undertaking add-on acquisitions,...

We examine how board networks affect change-of-control transactions by investigating whether directors’ deal exposure acquired through board service at different companies affect their current firms’ likelihood of being targeted in a private equity-backed, takeprivate transaction. In our sample of all US publicly traded firms in 2000–2007, we find that companies which have directors with privat...