We analyze the trade-off faced by growth firms between hoarding cash (and delaying investment) and incurring dilution from external financing. Such nonprecautionary hoarding features a self-reinforcing effect: firms with better investment opportunities hoard less, yet grow successful and cash-rich more quickly. We show that non-precautionary hoarding affects the choice between public and privat...

One influential criticism of the stock market oriented U.S. financial system is that its excessive focus on short term quarterly earnings forces public firms to behave in a myopic manner. We hypothesize that if capital markets pressure listed firms to be myopic in a way that impacts efficiency, then going private (when myopia is eliminated) should cause U.S. firms to improve their establishment...

In short, it depends on the ownership type. We construct an event-based outcome measure of firm-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impact for public and private firms globally from 2007 to 2015 using data from RepRisk. Then, we measure the societal impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagements using participation in the United Nations Global Compact as a proxy. We d...

The primary objective of this article is to develop an economics-based analytical framework for assessing the impact of government incentives/regulations designed to offset the tendency to underinvest in cybersecurity related activities by private sector firms. The analysis provided in the article shows that the potential for government incentives/regulations to increase cybersecurity investmen...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level performance (e.g. productivity, profitability and stock market value). Private Equityowned firms are significantly better managed than government, family and privately o...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level performance (e.g. productivity, profitability and stock market value). Private Equityowned firms are significantly better managed than government, family and privately o...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of whether independent and dependent private equity investors affect the underpricing of firms which went public on the Nouveau Marché and on the Neuer Markt between 1997 and 2000. In the sample of the Neuer Markt, the involvement of private equity investors reduces the underpricing of the firms' shares only if private equity investors sell a part of th...

We study how access to private equity financing affects real firm activities using a broad panel of publicly traded U.S. firms that raise external equity through private placements (PIPEs) between 1995 and 2008. The public firms relying on PIPEs are generally small, high-tech firms that cannot finance investment internally and likely face severe external financing constraints; PIPEs are by far ...

Prior research has examined audit pricing for publicly held firms and provided some evidence of a Big 8 premium in pricing. We investigate audit pricing among private firms for the first time, and we compare audit pricing for private and public clients. We present evidence of a pricing premium, on average, for non-Big 5 auditors among large private clients after controlling for other effects. W...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of frontier production function to measure the technical efficiency for Iranian textile companies during 1995. The objective of this estimation is to investigate if there are any differences in the technical efficiency between the private and public firms as well as the relationship between technical efficiency and size of textile companies in Iran. A...