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,...

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 provides new evidence on the role of distance between banks and borrowers in bank lending. We argue that delegated monitors face higher costs of collecting information about nonlocal borrowers due to the difficulty of obtaining and verifying soft information over distances. Further,...

We examine dispersion in director characteristics within a board. Directors with different skills can augment the board's overall expertise and decision making flexibility, but they also face coordination problems. Empirically, the negative effect of dispersion on value prevails. To establish...