Corporate-governance provisions related to takeover defenses and shareholder rights vary substantially across firms. In this paper, we use the incidence of 24 different provisions to build a 'Governance Index' for about 1,500 firms per year, and then we study the relationship between this index...

We analyze institutional investors' preferences for stocks and the implications that these preferences have for stock-market prices and returns. We find that -- a category including all managers with greater than $100 million under discretionary control -- have nearly doubled their share of the...

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider's cash flow rights and voting rights with firm value,...

This paper analyzes the equity-portfolio recommendations made by investment newsletters. The dataset spans 17 years, is free of survivor and back-fill biases, and includes the complete recommendations for 153 different newsletters. Overall, there is no significant evidence of superior...

This paper compares the careers of Ivy League athletes to those of their non-athlete classmates. Combining team-level information on all Ivy League athletes from 1970 to 2021 with resume data for all Ivy League graduates, we examine both post-graduate education and career choices as well as...

Financial economists in recent years have closely examined and intensely debated the performance of initial public offerings using data after the formation of NASDAQ. The paper seeks to shed light on this controversy by undertaking a large, out-of-sample study: we examine the performance for up...

We examine the determinants of venture capital fundraising in the U.S. over the past twenty-five years. We study industry aggregate, state-level, and firm-specific fundraising to determine if macroeconomic, regulatory, or performance factors affect venture capital activity. We find that shifts...

We examine a sample of over thirty thousand transactions by corporate and other venture organizations. Corporate venture investments in entrepreneurial firms appear to be at least as successful (using such measures as the probability of the portfolio firm going public) as those backed by...

We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decisionmaking and activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to maximize value, their actions...

A large body of literature suggests that firm-level stock prices 'underreact' to news about future cash flows, i.e., shocks to a firm's expected cash flows are positively correlated with shocks to expected returns on its stock. We estimate a vector autoregession to examine the joint behavior of...