We present evidence that firms attempting IPOs learn from the experience of their contemporaries. These information spillovers affect revisions in offer terms and the decision whether to carry through with an offering. The evidence also supports the argument that IPOs are implicitly bundled as a...

We derive conditions for when having a "busy" director on the board is harmful to shareholders and when it is beneficial. Our model allows directors to condition their monitoring choices on their co-directors' choices and to experience positive or negative monitoring synergies across firms....

We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the...

We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary and continuous outcomes. Variation in parameters can produce either positive or negative...

This paper develops a model of IPOs in which book building and a grey market (i.e. a when-issued market) take place simultaneously. While book building contains information about the fundamental value of the issue and is kept confidential, the grey market reflects the opinion of retail investors...

Every equilibrium model of IPO underpricing predicts a positive relationship between ex ante uncertainty about firm value and the extent to which entrepreneurs will issue shares at a discount to their subsequent market value. Since ex ante uncertainty is unobservable, the empirical literature...

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...

We examine the relation between firm value and managerial incentives in a sample of 1,307 publicly-held U.S. firms in 1992-1997. As predicted by Berle and Means (1932), we find that CEOs do not maximize firm value when they are not the residual claimant: our firms have higher Tobin's Q, the...

We document that firms appear disinclined to share underwriters with other firms in the same industry. We show that this disinclination is evident only when firms engage in product-market competition. This leads us to suggest that concerns about information leakage may motivate thepatterns we...