Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held companies, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an economic explanation for the use of put and call options, pre-emption rights, catch-up clauses, drag-along rights, demand rights, and...

We examine the relation between firm value and managerial incentives in a sample of 1,307 publicly-held U.S. firms in 1992-1997. As predicted by Berle and Means (1932), we find that CEOs do not maximize firm value when they are not the residual claimant: our firms have higher Tobin's Q, the...

We model an IPO company's optimal response to the presence of sentiment investors andshort sale constraints. Given regulatory constraints on price discrimination, the optimal mech-anism involves the issuer allocating stock to `regular' institutional investors for subsequentresale to sentiment...

We document how gathering ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information helps boards of directors to learn a CEO’s ability over time; test under what circumstances boards fire CEOs; and show that such interventions lead to improved firm performance. Our empirical design exploits detailed hard...

We document sizeable and surprising 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 substantially less and are less responsive to changes in investment opportunities compared to...

We analyze the determinants of buyout funds' investment decisions. We argue that when the supply of capital is lsquo;sticky' in the short run, the timing of funds' investment decisions, their risk-taking behavior, and their subsequent returns depend on changes in the demand for private equity,...

We analyze the determinants of buyout funds' investment decisions. We argue that when the supply of capital is lsquo;sticky' in the short run, the timing of funds' investment decisions, their risk-taking behavior, and their subsequent returns depend on changes in the demand for private equity,...

We analyze the determinants of buyout funds' investment decisions. We argue that when the supply of capital is lsquo;sticky' in the short run, the timing of funds' investment decisions, their risk-taking behavior, and their subsequent returns depend on changes in the demand for private equity,...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held companies, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an economic explanation for the use of put and call options, preemption rights, catch-up clauses, drag-along rights, demand rights,...

IPO initial returns reached astronomical levels during 1999-2000. We show that the regime shift in initial returns and other elements of pricing behavior can be at least partially accounted for by a variety of marked changes in pre-IPO ownership structure and insider selling behavior over...