The extent to which business groups ever existed in the United States and, if they did exist, the reasons for their disappearance are poorly understood. In this paper we use hitherto unexplored historical sources to construct a comprehensive data set to address this issue. We find that (1)...

Most listed firms are freestanding in the U.S, while listed firms in other countries often belong to business groups: lasting structures in which listed firms control other listed firms. Hand-collected historical data illuminate how the present ownership structure of the United States arose: (1)...

The options-based approach to studying irreversible investment under uncertainty emphasizes that the opportunity cost of investment includes the value of the option to wait that is extinguished when an investment is undertaken. Thus, the investment decision is affected by the determinants of the...

Empirical evidence suggests that the distribution of earnings reports is discontinuous. This is puzzling since the distribution of true earnings is likely to be continuous. We present a model that rationalizes this phenomenon. In our model, managers report their earnings to rational investors,...

Why do brokers charge per-share commissions to institutional traders? What determines the commission charge? We examine commissions and order flow for a sample of institutional orders and find that most per-share commissions are concentrated at only a few price points, primarily 5 and 6 cents...