We find support for two key predictions of an agency theory of unproductive corporate social responsibility. First, increasing managerial ownership decreases measures of firm goodness. We use the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut to increase after-tax insider ownership. Firms with moderate levels of insider...

Our paper demonstrates that while failure tolerance by investors may encourage potential entrepreneurs to innovate, financiers with investment strategies that tolerate early failure endogenously choose to fund less radical innovations. Failure tolerance as an equilibrium price that increases in...

An influential thesis, dubbed "Doing well by doing good," argues that corporate social responsibility is profitable. But heterogeneity in firm financial constraints can induce a spurious correlation between profits and goodness even if the motives for goodness are non-profit in nature. We use...

We show that Tobin's q, as proxied by the ratio of the firm's market value to its book value, increases with the firm's systematic equity risk and falls with the firm's unsystematic equity risk. Further, an increase in the firm's total equity risk is associated with a fall in q. The negative...

We analyze the differences between companies owned by private equity (PE) investors and similar public companies. We document that PE-owned companies use much stronger incentives for their top executives and have substantially higher debt levels. However, we find little evidence that PE-owned...

A bidding process can be organized so that offers are submitted simultaneously or sequentially. In the latter case, potential buyers can condition their behavior on previous entrants' decisions. The relative performance of these mechanisms is investigated when entry is costly and selective,...

We survey more than 1,000 CEOs and CFOs to understand how capital is allocated, and decision-making authority is delegated, within firms. We find that CEOs are least likely to share or delegate decision-making authority in mergers and acquisitions, relative to delegation of capital structure,...

Recent research on the economics of patents is surveyed. The topics covered include theoretical and empirical evidence on patents as an incentive for innovation, the effectiveness of patents for invention disclosure, patent valuation, and what we know about the design of patent systems. We also...

Governments rescue private companies partly to prevent other firms from gaining excessive market power. However, if failing firms exit, new entry may limit remaining firms' market power if there are potential entrants who can be as effective competitors as the firms leaving the market. We...

This paper studies how portfolios with a global investment scope are actually allocated internationally using a unique micro dataset on U.S. equity mutual funds. While mutual funds have great flexibility to invest globally, they invest in a surprisingly limited number of stocks, around 100. The...