We provide one of the first large sample comparisons of cash policies in public and private U.S. firms. We first show that despite higher financing frictions, private firms hold, on average, about half as much cash as public firms do. By examining the drivers of cash policies for each group, we...

In this paper we study CEO contract design employing a unique dataset on privately-held and public firm CEO annual compensation over the period 1999-2011. We first show that CEOs in public firms are paid 30% more than CEOs in comparable privately-held firms. We further show that both private and...

We compare innovation strategies of public and private firms based on a large sample over the period 1997-2008. We find that public firms' patents rely more on existing knowledge, are more exploitative, and are less likely in new technology classes, while private firms' patents are broader in...

We compare CEO turnover in public and large private firms. Public firms have higher turnover rates and exhibit greater turnover-performance sensitivities than private firms. Controlling for pre-turnover performance, performance improvements are greater for private firms than for public firms. We...

We provide one of the first large sample comparisons of cash policies in public and private U.S. firms. We first show that on average private firms hold less than half as much cash as public firms do. The higher cash holdings of public firms are partially caused by the fact that public firms add...

We provide new evidence on the debate whether CEOs in public U.S. firms are significantly overpaid using their counterparts in private U.S. firms over the period 1999 to 2008. Using public and private firm CEO pay data made available through mandated SEC disclosures, we first show that after...