We compare firms that go public using penny stock initial public offerings (PSIPOs) to those using reverse mergers (RMs). Firms using RMs tend to be highly information asymmetric in contrast with the existing going public theory. Firms tend to opt for the RM path with the intent to acquire a...

We study how access to private equity financing affects real firm activities using a broad panel of publicly traded U.S. firms that raise external equity through private placements (PIPEs) between 1995 and 2008. The public firms relying on PIPEs are generally small, high-tech firms that cannot...

Size threshold-based regulatory requirements are pervasive, but little is known about how they affect the merger and acquisition (M&A) behavior of firms around the thresholds. M&As cause discrete increases in size, so we hypothesize changes in firms' M&A behavior near regulatory size thresholds....

We reexamine long-term abnormal returns for portfolios sorted on governance characteristics. Firms with strong shareholder rights and firms with weak shareholder rights differ from the population of firms and from each other in how they cluster across industries. Using well-specified tests under...