This paper exploits a natural experiment to investigate the impact of participation constraints on households' decision to invest in the stock market. Exogenous variation in financial wealth results from unexpected inheritance due to sudden deaths, and allows us to examine the causal impact of...

We analyze the impact of a 75 pct. Break-Through rule on 1,035 European firms with dual class shares. In 3-5 pct. of the firms the controlling owners incur a direct loss of control, whereas in additional 11-17 pct. of the firms the controlling owners are likely to incur a control loss. Firms in...

This paper uses a unique dataset from Denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance. We focus on the decision to appoint either a family or external chief executive officer (CEO). The paper...

Entrepreneurial finance literature has highlighted that institutional investors are the main contributors to private equity funds. This paper complements these findings by documenting that institutional investors also invest directly in private equity. A major concern for such investments is the...

We investigate contributions of independent directors to shareholder value by examining stock price reactions to sudden deaths in the U.S. from 1994 to 2007. We find, first, that following director death, stock prices drop by 0.85% on average. Second, the degree of independence and board...

The entrepreneurial finance literature has highlighted that institutional investors are the main contributors to private equity funds. This paper complements these findings by documenting that institutional investors also invest directly in private equity. A major concern for such investments is...

We design experiments to jointly elicit risk and time preferences for the adult Danish population. Since subjects are generally risk averse, we find that joint elicitation provides estimates of discount rates that are significantly lower than those found in previous studies and more in line with...

We design experiments to jointly elicit risk and time preferences for the adult Danish population. We find that joint elicitation results in estimates of time preferences that are dramatically lower than those found in previous studies. Estimation of latent time preferences requires that one...

We examine the properties of a popular method for eliciting choices and values from experimental subjects, the multiple price list format. The main advantage of this format is that it is relatively transparent to subjects and provides simple incentives for truthful revelation. The main...

We use a natural experiment to investigate the impact of participation constraints on individuals' decisions to invest in the stock market. Unexpected inheritance due to sudden deaths results in exogenous variation in financial wealth and allows us to examine whether fixed entry and ongoing...