We present evidence that banking development plays a key role in technological progress. We focus on manufacturing firms' innovative performance, measured by patent-based metrics, and employ exogenous variations in banking development arising from the staggered deregulation of banking activities...

Despite recent evidence on the importance of chief executive officer (CEO) successions in family firms, we still know little about the differences in corporate strategies entailed by family and professional managers around transition. We investigate the consequences of managerial successions for...

We investigate how corporate governance affects the ability of firms to compete in international markets. Our empirical analysis draws on a variety of methods, including instrumental variable regressions, natural experiments and event studies. We find that firms subject to worse corporate...

We investigate the effect of board connections on the debt structure of private firms. Using a comprehensive panel data set from Italy, our empirical evidence indicates that independent directors who sit on multiple boards facilitate firms' access to external debt, mostly in the form of trade...

A recent literature shows that the spike in uncertainty during political elections harms firms’ investment. Bridging insights from international business and political science, we argue that the effect of political elections on firms’ investment activities is contingent on the country’s...

What type of firms are more likely to survive or even thrive in disaster events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and the COVID-19 pandemic? We investigate whether family ownership and industry positioning affect firms’ ability to capture opportunities for business recovery after a natural...

We study how ownership similarity between two firms affects the likelihood of an acquisition between them. Assortative matching arguments suggest that similarity between acquiring and target firms can encourage acquisition behavior since more similar partners can better understand one another...

We show that families are an engine of venturing activities: one third of all corporate venture capital (CVC) deals in the US from 2000 to 2017 originated from family firms. Family firms orchestrate CVC activities differently than non-family firms: they syndicate more often and with more...