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We examine the current state of the American public corporation and how it has evolved over the last forty years. There are fewer public corporations now than forty years ago, but they are much older and larger. They invest differently, as the importance of R&D investments has grown relative to capital expenditures.
On average, public firms have record high cash holdings and in most recent years they have more cash than long-term debt. They are less profitable than they used to be and profits are more concentrated, as the top 100 firms now account for most of the net income of American public firms. Accounting statements are less informative about the performance and the value of firms because firms increasingly invest in intangible assets that do not appear on their balance sheets. Firms’ total payouts to shareholders as a percent of net income are at record levels, suggesting that firms either lack opportunities to invest or have poor incentives to invest. The credit crisis appears to leave few traces on the course of American public corporations.
We use new data that measure forward-looking physical climate risk at the firm level to examine the impact of climate risk on capital structure. We find...
The firms listed on the stock market in aggregate contribute less to total non-farm employment and GDP now than in the 1970s. A major reason for this...
We investigate the impact on firms of joining the S&P 500 index from 1997 to 2017. We find that the positive announcement effect on the stock price of...