During the past forty years, the media and academics have frequently maligned corporate investments in venture capital and highlighted visible failures. Many corporations' best ideas have languished, whether because of internal resistance or an inability to execute on the initial insight. In...

The contributors – top international scholars from finance, law and business – explore the role of governance, both internal and external, in explaining risk-taking and other aspects of the behavior of financial institutions. Additionally, they discuss market and policy features...

In a sample of 2,794 initial public offerings (IPOs), we test three potential explanations for the existence of IPO lockups: lockups serve as (i) a signal of firm quality, (ii) a commitment device to alleviate moral hazard problems, or (iii) a mechanism for underwriters to extract additional...

This paper analyzes institutional investors' demand for stock characteristics and the implications of this demand for stock prices and returns. We find that "large" institutional investors nearly doubled their share of the stock market from 1980 to 1996. Overall, this compositional shift tends...

Financial economists have intensely debated the performance of IPOs using data after the formation of Nasdaq. This paper sheds light on this controversy by undertaking a large, out-of-sample study: We examine the performance for five years after listing of 3,661 U.S. IPOs from 1935 to 1972. The...