Firms often exploit loopholes in government contracts to boost revenues. The welfare consequences of this behavior depend on how firms use the marginal windfall dollar, yet little evidence exists to guide policymakers. This paper studies how hospitals allocated over $3 billion obtained from...

For some privately-held firms, the costs of providing high-quality accrual-based financial statements may outweigh the benefits of accommodating the demands of their stakeholders who may rely more on cash flows or have direct access to management. For other private firms, greater stakeholder...

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...

We extend the U.S. bank M&As literature by examining bidder announcement abnormal returns in deals involving both public and private targets over a 32-years examination period. Our main findings document the existence of a listing effect in our sample. Banks gain when they acquire private firms...

The U.S. equity markets have experienced a remarkable decline in IPOs since 2000, both in terms of smaller IPO volume and entrepreneurial firms' greater tendency to exit through acquisitions rather than IPOs. Using proprietary U.S. Census data on private firms, we conduct a comprehensive...

We develop a method for identifying public firms in tax records in order to compare the investments of public and private firms using a representative sample of all US corporations. Despite private firms being significantly smaller than public firms on average, in aggregate, they account for an...