Lower underpricing amongst venture-backed IPOs has been attributed to a certification role for venture capitalists. We argue that differences in underpricing per se are uninformative and possibly misleading when not controlling for differences in entrepreneurs’ incentives to control...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately held firms, such as joint ventures and venture capital-backed companies. We provide an economic explanation for key clauses in such agreements-namely, put and call options, tag-along and drag-along rights, demand and...

We provide a direct estimate of the magnitude of agency costs in publicly held corporations. We compute an explicit performance benchmark that compares a firm's actual Tobin's Q to the Q* of a hypothetical value-maximizing firm having the same inputs and characteristics as the original firm. The...

We derive a behavioral measure of the IPO decision-maker's satisfaction with the underwriter's performance based on <link rid="b23">Loughran and Ritter (2002)</link> and assess its ability to explain the decision-maker's choice among underwriters in "subsequent" securities offerings. Controlling for other known...

Many financial markets are characterized by strong relationships and networks, rather than arm's-length, spot market transactions. We examine the performance consequences of this organizational structure in the context of relationships established when VCs syndicate portfolio company...

We provide evidence that firms attempting IPOs condition offer terms and the decision whether to carry through with an offering on the experience of their primary market contemporaries. Moreover, while initial returns and IPO volume are positively correlated in the aggregate, the correlation is...

IPO underpricing reached astronomical levels during 1999 and 2000. We show that the regime shift in initial returns and other elements of pricing behavior can be at least partially accounted for by marked changes in pre-IPO ownership structure and insider selling behavior over the period, which...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

We show that relatively optimistic research and even the mere provision of research coverage for the issuer (regardless of its direction) attract co-management appointments for securities offerings. Co-management appointments are valuable because they help banks establish relationships with...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly communist countries coupled with detailed “hard” information about the...