As firms have more assets in place, more of management's limited attention is focused on managing assets in place rather than developing new growth options. Consequently, as firms grow older, they have fewer growth options and a lower ability to generate new growth options. This simple theory...

Over time, firms increasingly focus on their core competences. This evolution impairs their ability to manage noncore assets, which they should therefore divest. We test this prediction and find consistent evidence. Moreover, mature firms divest more in response to exogenous technology shocks....

Although growth opportunities fade and profitability declines as firms mature, older firms are no more likely to be acquired than young firms are. This paper documents and explains that phenomenon. We argue that, because mature organizations are rationally less flexible, they are more costly to...

Failure to correct for pension risk leads to upward-biased discount rate estimates in firms with pension risk exposure. The result is a negative and economically significant relation between pension risk and corporate investment. The effect is confined to investment decisions that require...

As firms grow older, their profitability seems to decline. We first document this phenomenon and show that it is very robust. Then we offer two non-exclusive explanations of why firms may age. First, corporate aging could reflect a cementation of organizational rigidities over time. Consistent...

Listed firms have an incentive to render themselves attractive to investors at large. This paper examines whether listed and unlisted firms differ in their care for minority shareholders and finds supporting evidence. We examine control structure, disclosure, board architecture and processes,...

This paper is about shareholder value. We examine whether welfare considerations justify that target and whether competitive markets force firms to pursue it. We also argue that shareholder value is strictly an ill-defined goal. We report evidence from a large sample of listed firms across the...

We provide estimates of holdings of highly-rated securitization tranches of American bank holding companies ahead of the credit crisis and evaluate hypotheses that have been advanced to explain these holdings. Our broadest estimates include CDOs as well as holdings in off-balance-sheet conduits....

Defining as normal cash holdings the holdings a firm with the same characteristics would have had in the late 1990s, we find that the abnormal cash holdings of U.S. firms after the crisis represent on average 1.86% of assets. While U.S. firms held less cash than comparable foreign firms in the...

During the past two decades, the fraction of the world's initial public offerings (IPOs) accounted for by U.S. firms has fallen sharply. This decrease is attributed to higher IPO activity outside the U.S. and lower IPO activity in the U.S. We show that financial globalization has played a major...