Private firms' ability to communicate confidentially with selected investors implies that valuation disagreements between firms and investors are larger at public firms than at private ones. Consistent with the notion that misvaluation concerns lead public firms to hoard cash to be able to...

We survey the literature on payout policy, with a particular emphasis on developments in the last two decades. Of the traditional motives of why firms pay out (agency, signaling, and taxes), the cross-sectional empirical evidence is most persuasive in favor of agency considerations. Studies...

We survey the literature on payout policy, with a particular emphasis on developments in the past two decades. The cross-sectional empirical evidence for the traditional motivations behind firms paying out (agency, signaling, and taxes) is most persuasive with regard to agency considerations....

This paper estimates the extent to which market power is a source of production misallocation. Productive inefficiency occurs through more production being allocated to higher-cost units of production, and less production to lower-cost production units, conditional on a fixed aggregate quantity....

We consider vertical contracts where the retail market may involve search frictions. Minimum advertised price restrictions (MAP) act as a restraint on customers' information and so can increase search frictions in the retail sector. Such restraints, thereby, soften retail competition—an impact...

This paper studies scoring auctions, a procedure commonly used to buy differentiated products: suppliers submit offers on all dimensions of the good (price, level of non monetary attributes), and these are evaluated using a scoring rule. We provide a systematic analysis of equilibrium behavior...