We run a novel field experiment to link managers of African manufacturing firms.  The experiment features exogenous link formation, exogenous seeding of information and exogenous assignment to treatment and placebo.  We study the impact of the experiment on firm business practices outside of...

Using novel data on European firms, this paper examines the effect of business group affiliation on innovation. We find that business groups foster the scale and novelty of corporate innovation. Group affiliation is particularly important in industries that rely more on external finance and have...

This paper analyses the survival of the complete cohort of more than 162,000 limited companies incorporated in Britain in 2001 over the subsequent five-year period.  For this purpose, we estimate firms' hazards of failure and survival functions using nonparametric and semi-parametric...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did it make a contribution to industrial development in Interwar Britain?  The interwar stock market laboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffective...

Rational demand for hedging products, where there is a risk of contractual nonperformance, is fundamentally different to that for indemnity insurance.  In particular, optimal demand is zero for infinitely risk averse individuals, and is nonmonotonic in risk aversion, wealth and price.  For...

Using a newly constructed data set, we compare sources of funds and investment strategies of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK. Sources of VC funds differ significantly across countries, e.g. banks are particularly important in Germany, corporations in Israel,...

In this paper, we analyse a novel panel data set to compare the relevance of alternative measures of capitalisation for bank failure during the 2007-10 crisis, and to search for evidence of manipulated Basel risk-weights.  Compared with the unweighted leverage ratio, we find the risk-weighted...

We posit that screening IPOs requires specialized labor which, in the short run, is in fixed supply.  Hence, a sudden increase in demand for IPO financing increases the compensation of IPO screening labor.  Increased compensation results in reduced screening which encourages sub-marginal firms...

We model corporate governance in a world with competitive securities markets as well as markets for corporate assets.  We show that varying the liquidity and opacity of corporate assets, the vitality of the market for corporate control, and the costs of enforcing shareholder rights to cash...

We model long-run firm performance, management compensation, and corporate governance in a dynamic, nonstationary world.  We show that managerial compensation and governance policies, which, in a single-period context, can best be rationalized by self-serving managerial influence over board...