We analyze the link between creditor rights and firms' investment policies, proposing that stronger creditor rights in bankruptcy reduce corporate risk-taking. In cross-country analysis, we find that stronger creditor rights induce greater propensity of firms to engage in diversifying...

Using a hand-coded dataset tracking the backgrounds of U.S. governors between 1993 and 2021, we argue that officeholders with military experience are less likely to engage in political cronyism. Military governors are less likely to increase subsidies to corporations when they become “lame...

Technological uniqueness, defined as the degree to which a firm’s patented technologies differ from its industry competitors, has an unclear relationship with firm performance. On the one hand, recent empirical work in economics suggests that technological uniqueness can act as a barrier to...

Growth equity (GE) funds have emerged as the third major private equity asset class for investors, alongside venture capital (VC) and buyout (B/O) funds, and as an important new source of external equity capital for private companies and entrepreneurs wishing to fund growth without surrendering...

Using mergers and acquisitions as a testing ground we examine whether managers face conflicting incentives in selecting the uniqueness of their corporate strategy. We argue that firms that pursue strategies which assemble commonly-bundled assets may pay more for these assets, perhaps as a...

I study the capital structure of non-financial firms that own a financial subsidiary. In a panel of U.S. non-financial firms over 1984-2007 I find that a significant part of the overall Compustat non-financial universe maintains a financial subsidiary. Such non-financial firms have higher...