We document the existence of a strategy designed to circumvent limits to arbitrage. Faced with short-sale constraints and noise trader risk, small arbitrageurs publicly reveal their information to induce the target's shareholders (the longs) to sell, thereby accelerating price discovery. Using...

Financial constraints are fundamental to empirical research in finance and economics. We propose two tests to evaluate how well measures of financial constraints actually capture constraints. We find that firms typically classified as constrained do not in fact behave as if they were...

We study the efficiency of capital allocations at state-controlled and privately owned business groups in China. Using highly granular data on within-group capital transfers, we document stark differences: while private groups allocate more capital to units with better investment opportunities,...

We solve a dynamic Kyle model in which the large investor's private information concerns her plans for taking an active role in governance. We show that once a block has been created, its continued existence is jeopardized by an increase in the liquidity of the firm's stock. Greater liquidity...

We document how gathering ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information helps boards of directors to learn a CEO’s ability over time; test under what circumstances boards fire CEOs; and show that such interventions lead to improved firm performance. Our empirical design exploits detailed hard...

We study how well-incentivized boards monitor CEOs and whether such monitoring improves performance. Using unique, detailed data on boards' information sets and decisions for a large sample of private-equity-backed firms, we find that gathering information helps boards learn about CEO ability....

We investigate whether short-termism distorts the investment decisions of stock market listed firms. To do so, we compare the investment behavior of observably similar public and private firms using a new data source on private U.S. firms, assuming for identification that closely held private...

Over the past two decades, the U.S. stock market has been shrinking as the public firm model has begun to fall out of favor. We develop a political economy model of delistings to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that the private and social incentives to delist firms...

Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk-taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its...