Recent studies find that women are less competitive than men. This gender difference in competitiveness has been suggested as a possible explanation for why men occupy the majority of top positions in many sectors. In this study we explore competitiveness in children. A related field experiment...

Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

We describe and present time series evidence on the leveraged buyout/private equity industry, both firms and transactions. We discuss the existing empirical evidence on the economics of the firms and transactions. We consider similarities and differences between the recent private equity wave...

If individuals derive a small utility from gambling, we should observe high turnover in stock portfolios that are of only marginal importance to them. By the use of detailed individual financial data, as weIl as trades from a Swedish online broker, we measure the frequency and cost of online...

Communication is at the core of good governance, yet, because of data constraints, research on boardroom communication is almost nonexistent. I examine communication in the boardroom using a survey of the entire population of directors and CEOs of publicly-traded firms in Sweden during 2006. The...

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm policies and performance, but identifying an effect empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. However, unlike other blockholders, individuals tend to hold blocks in corporations that are located close...

Stop-loss rules-predetermined policies that reduce a portfolio's exposure after reaching a certain threshold of cumulative losses-are commonly used by retail and institutional in- vestors to manage the risks of their investments, but have also been viewed with some skep- ticism by critics who...

To understand the investment behavior of venture capital (VC) investors, this paper estimates a dynamic model of learning. Behavior reflecting both learning from past investments (exploitation) and anticipated future learning (exploration) are found to be prevalent, and the model's additional...

I provide evidence that analysts whose earnings forecast revisions showed signs of greater exaggeration in the past make recommendation changes that lead to lower abnormal returns than their peers. Interpreting stock recommendations as a forecast of future abnormal returns, I show that this...

Economic theories suggest that a firm's corporate culture matters for its policy choices. We construct a parent-spinoff firm panel dataset that allows us to identify culture effects in firm policies from behavior that is inherited by a spinoff firm from its parent after the firms split up. We...