The Effects of Disclosure Regulation on Innovative Firms: Private Values* by Jos Jansen Firms in an R&D race actively manage rivals’ beliefs by disclosing and concealing information on their cost of investment. The firms’ disclosure strategies affect their incentives to invest in R&D, and to acquire information. We compare equilibria under voluntary disclosure with those under mandatory disclos...

We study a sample of diversified firms that alter their organizational structure by divesting an entire business segment, primarily through asset sales. These firms experience a substantial reduction in the diversification discount after the divestiture. Investment in the firm’s ongoing segments is more sensitive to their imputed market to book ratio. We show that the efficiency of segment inve...

We analyze information security investment decisions by two firms that possess imperfectly substitutable information assets. Information assets are imperfectly substitutable if information at each firm is valuable and becomes more valuable when combined. When compared to optimal investment decisions made by a central planner, we find diametrically opposite results in the case where these decisi...

Are initial competitive advantages self-reinforcing, so that markets exhibit an endogenous tendency to be dominated by only a few firms? Although this question is of great economic importance, no systematic empirical study has yet addressed it. Therefore, we examine experimentally whether firms with an initial cost advantage are more likely to invest in cost reductions than firms with higher in...

This paper uses a new data-set to examine how internal capital markets and foreign ownership affect investment. Our data allow us to compare investment behaviour of listed subsidiaries with stand-alone firms while controlling for investment opportunities of parent and subsidiary firms. We evaluate how the size of ownership and the geographical proximity of majority owners to their subsidiaries ...

This study examines the influence of investment bank’s reputation and political connection on the IPO qualification of Chinese firms. The results show that firms which are sponsored by prestigious investment banks are more likely to pass the regular screening process. Also, the investment bank’s political connections have no significant impact on the IPO qualification. Furthermore, we compared ...

This thesis studies a range of topics in empirical corporate finance, and consists of three essays. The first essay is sole-authored and is titled ‘The Value of Social Networks during Periods of Distress.’ The second essay ‘The Role of Investment Banker Directors in M&A: Can Experts Help?’ is a joint work with Feng Jiang, Erik Lie, and Ke Yang. The third essay is titled ‘Acquisitions of Financi...

The question about whether investor sentiment correlates with their corporate investment is often examined in the literature. Thus, based on behavioral finance theory, this paper aims to investigate whether investor sentiment in stock market has an impact on corporate investment in listed Chinese firms, where the mutual fund flows is taken as the proxy variable of investor sentiment for stocks....

We study how access to private equity financing affects real firm activities using a broad panel of publicly traded U.S. firms that raise external equity through private placements (PIPEs) between 1995 and 2008. The public firms relying on PIPEs are generally small, high-tech firms that cannot finance investment internally and likely face severe external financing constraints; PIPEs are by far ...