Weak creditor rights introduce contracting frictions and magnify conflicts of interest between borrowers and creditors. We examine the effects of creditor rights on the sensitivity of bank lending terms to aggregate relative to firm-specific information. We formulate two competing hypotheses. On...

This paper conducts a cross-country empirical study of institutions and agency conflicts around ownership reforms and their implications for changes in performance and efficiency. We examine two main questions. First, we examine the privatization sample and evaluate property rights and...

This paper examines access to external financing in the privatization context and provides new evidence on the effects of financing constraints on performance and investment. Ownership reforms increase firms' reliance on external financing. Empirically, performance and investment changes around...

A much-needed critical investigation of the root causes of the European sovereign debt crisis, featuring contributions from Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and the Argentine chief negotiator with the IMF, Roberto Lavagna

This paper examines the propensity of firms to comove in investment decisions. Although stock return comovement and herding among investors received considerable attention in existing work, little is known about correlated investment behavior of firms. After controlling for the similarity of...

This paper examines strategic interactions between venture capitalists (VCs) and top underwriters in the IPO process. We test two contrasting hypotheses: certification and rent extraction. On the one hand, the joint involvement of VCs and top underwriters can amplify their certification effect,...