We use a natural experiment in the form of 121 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states to show that tax considerations are a first-order determinant of firms' capital structure choices. Over the period 1990-2011, firms increase long-term leverage by 104 basis points on...

We derive conditions for when having a “busy” director on the board is harmful to shareholders and when it is beneficial. Our model allows directors to condition their monitoring choices on their co-directors' choices and to experience positive or negative monitoring synergies across firms....

Can managers influence the liquidity of their firms' shares? We use plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of public information to show that firms seek to actively shape their information environments by voluntarily disclosing more information than is mandated by market regulations and...

We evaluate differences in investment behavior between stock market listed and privately held firms in the U.S. using a rich new data source on private firms. Listed firms invest less and are less responsive to changes in investment opportunities compared to observably similar, matched private...

Is greater trading liquidity good or bad for corporate governance? We address this question both theoretically and empirically. We solve a model consisting of an optimal IPO followed by a dynamic Kyle market in which the large investor's private information concerns her own plans for taking an...

Financial constraints are not directly observable, so empirical research relies on indirect measures. We evaluate how well five popular measures (paying dividends, having a credit rating, and the Kaplan-Zingales, Whited-Wu, and Hadlock-Pierce indices) identify firms that are financially...

Limits to arbitrage play a central role in behavioral finance. They are thought to interfere with arbitrage processes so that security prices can deviate from true values for extended periods of time. We describe a recent financial innovation that allows limits to arbitrage to be sidestepped,...

We study the efficiency of capital allocations at state-controlled and privately owned business groups in China. Using highly granular data on within-group capital transfers, we document stark differences: while private groups allocate more capital to units with better investment opportunities,...

Over the past two decades, the U.S. stock market has been shrinking as the public firm model has begun to fall out of favor. We develop a political economy model of delistings to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that the private and social incentives to delist firms...

Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk-taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its...