Knowledge that Transforms

Firms’ green technology investments are increasingly important for competitive positioning, yet their impact on long-run performance remains unclear. Using electricity capacity data for global utility firms, we construct a unique structural measure of technological greenness based on renewable versus fossil fuel physical infrastructure. We find that adopting sustainable technologies is followed by a long-run improvement in corporate fundamentals that is only partially reflected in stock prices, yielding superior returns over a multi-year horizon. These results partly reflect higher revenue growth in liberalized retail markets rather than investor sentiment, revealing a consumer-based mechanism that likely extends to competitive downstream sectors.

We survey 153 empirical studies of family firms and document 192 operational definitions representing 25 distinct definition types. These definitions can be decomposed into five recurring, codable dimensions: ownership, management, board representation, embeddedness, and succession. We relate these dimensions to economic mechanisms including agency conflicts, residual control rights, transaction costs, and dynastic control. Alternative definitions select systematically different populations and yield materially different estimates of firm performance and innovation. Definition choice is largely unrelated to the research question, except in succession studies. Ownership thresholds track private enforcement of self-dealing rules, but not statutory shareholder rights or rule of law. We conclude that the family firm is a family of related constructs rather than a single latent construct. Definitions should therefore match the family-firm construct implied by the research question, and results should be reported across alternative classification rules.

A variety of timing strategies shown to generate alpha and high Sharpe ratios at the monthly horizon exhibit substantially deteriorated performance at longer investment horizons. The effect is large: multi-factor alphas are more than halved going from one-month to 10-year returns, and factors that exploit time-series predictability drive them to zero. I argue that such return dynamics reflect compensation for exposure to shocks that are particularly risky from a long-horizon investor’s perspective. I illustrate the idea by showing that seasonality in the volatility of price-of-risk and expected-cash-flow shocks generates seemingly profitable timing strategies.

This paper investigates the role of rights offerings in U.S. Chapter 11 reorganizations as a new market-based mechanism for mitigating bargaining frictions. Using novel hand-collected data, I document three facts: (i) over the past two decades, rights offerings financed 35% of large bankruptcies, (ii) they are predominantly proposed and underwritten by hedge funds, and (iii) their occurrence is highly correlated with stock market performance. In an instrumental variable setting, I find that compared with other sources of financing, rights offerings lead to higher creditor recoveries, shorter reorganization durations, and lower refiling rates. They also allow firms to access new capital without resorting to asset liquidations, which are value-reducing. My findings suggest that by alleviating key bargaining frictions in large and complex bankruptcy cases, rights offerings may improve the efficiency of resource allocation in the economy.