In choosing transparency, firms must trade off the benefits from better access to finance against the cost of a greater tax burden. We study this trade-off in a model with distortionary taxes and endogenous rationing of external finance. The evidence from two different data sets, one formed only...

Entrepreneurs may be constrained by the law to bequeath a minimal stake to non-controlling heirs. The size of this stake can reduce investment in family firms, by reducing the future income they can pledge to external financiers. Using a purpose-built indicator of the permissiveness of...

We investigate the determinants of firms’ implicit employment and wage insurance to employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. We rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and between national public insurance programs to gauge...

The underpricing of the shares sold through Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) is generally explained with asymmetric information and risk. We complement these traditional explanations with a new theory. Investors who buy IPO shares are also concerned by expected liquidity and by the uncertainty...

This paper investigates the importance of accessing public capital markets through an initial public offering (IPO), and the consequent relaxation of firms’ financial constraints, for firm-level long term employment decisions. We find that firms significantly increase post-IPO investment in...

We provide new empirical evidence concerning the contentious debate over the use of historical cost (HCA) versus mark-to-market (MTM) accounting in regulating financial institutions. These accounting rules, through their interactions with capital regulations, alter financial institutions’...

We present a model where firms compete for scarce managerial talent ("alpha") and managers are risk-averse. When managers cannot move across firms after being hired, employers learn about their talent, allocate them efficiently to projects and provide insurance to low-quality managers. When...

In the past two decades, academic research has produced massive evidence of the beneficial role of financial development for growth and the allocation of investment. Our current vision, however, is dominated by instances of dysfunctional behavior of financial markets associated with acute and...

Since 2008, euro-area sovereign yields have diverged sharply, and so have the corresponding CDS premia. At the same time, banks’ sovereign debt portfolios featured an increasing home bias. We investigate the relationship between these two facts, and its rationale. First, we inquire to what...

We study a model where some investors (“hedgers”) are bad at information processing, while others (“speculators”) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from...