With talk of driverless companies and bots substituting for human beings on company boards either in part or completely, the spectre of a future controlled by entities devoid of human beings is upon us. But has the future been here for...
Over recent decades, the on-going “digital revolution” has transformed many aspects of everyday life. Think of the increased power and shrinking size of personal computers and smartphones; the global expansion of the Internet...
We define creative companies by means of the Competing Value Framework, and we identify them by means of textual analysis. We show that a creative corporate culture is an important driver of innovation, as measured by the number of...
For the last decade economists have been preoccupied with the decline in bank financing to small businesses and entrepreneurs. This effort has produced a better understanding of the obstacles to external financing. We examine the...
‘Crowdfunding’ — raising capital through large numbers of small contributions — is a burgeoning phenomenon, spurred by the internet’s capacity to reduce communication costs. Its still-evolving status is reflected in...
The AGM is often considered to play an important role in direct shareholder monitoring of directors and corporate blockholders. However, its practical functioning suffers from large obstacles. In this research we outline the...
The public offering of truly new securities involves purchases by investors in sufficient number and in small enough blocks that each purchaser’s shares can reasonably be expected to be freely tradable in a secondary market that did...
This paper challenges the view that foreign investors lead firms to adopt a short-term orientation and forgo long-term investment. Using a comprehensive sample of publicly listed firms in 30 countries over the 2001-2010 period, we...
Even though firms? innovation efforts dwindle in reaction to weaker employment protection legislation (EPL), we show that the value of their investment opportunities actually increases. The reason is that weaker EPL discourages...
Innovation is a contract intensive economic activity in a world of incomplete contracts. We show that trust mitigates incomplete contracting and enhances innovation by acting as an informal contracting mechanism. Trust plays an...
Regulatory arbitrage refers to structuring activity to take advantage of gaps or differences in regulations or laws. Examples include Facebook modifying its terms and conditions to reduce the exposure of its user data to strict...
This paper is a chapter of a forthcoming monograph, Regulating the Crypto-economy, to be published by Hart Publishing in the latter half of 2021. The book looks at novel economic activity on permissionless blockchains, many of which...