We are witnessing a quiet but quick transformation of corporate governance. The rise of digital technologies and social media are forcing companies to reconsider how they organize themselves and structure firm governance.
What is...Read more
In this paper, we examine the relation between innovation and a firm's financial dependence using a sample of privately-held and publicly-traded U.S. firms. We find that public firms in external finance dependent industries spend more on R&D...Read more
The separation of ownership and control has always been central in corporate governance debates. A large body of literature has sought to show that control-enhancing arrangements can deter investors. However, the experience of the last few years...Read more
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 efforts...Read more
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 find instead...Read more
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 not exist...Read more
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 AGM’s flaws...Read more
‘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 diversity of contracting...Read more
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 market and ...Read more
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 patents a firm...Read more
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 and the new forms of...Read more
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, particularly in industries with...Read more