Using hand-collected data from Form Ds on executives in venture capital (VC)-backed private firms, I show that VC-driven top management changes lead to a significantly greater quantity and quality of innovation, which potentially occurs through new management teams hiring more and higher quality inventors. My evidence demonstrates that both founder replacements and non-founder management changes are associated with enhanced innovation. Further, adding top managers with general managerial skills enhances innovation, whereas changing managers with a prior technical background does not. Finally, top management changes lead to the adoption of an exploitative (rather than explorative) innovation search strategy by private firms.

This research proposes a novel firm-based model for pricing cyber insurance. Our model considers two types of cyber risk: virus attacks and data breaches. Virus attacks deliver adverse shocks to the firm’s productivity, while data breaches cause premium customer departures that worsen the prospect of the firm’s product demand. We derive the endogenous structural form of cyber losses in firms and utilize it to solve the formula for cyber insurance premiums. Our quantitative results show that the consensus prediction about a strictly positive premium-risk nexus is no longer valid. Asymmetries in the sub-premium’s sensitivity to cyber risks from different sources and the premium customer loss rates jointly shape the complexity of the relation between cyber insurance premiums and cyber risks. Improvements in the product demand conditions enhance firms’ incentives to hedge cyber losses and push premiums higher. Lastly, we discuss the influence of product price competition on premiums.

Managers often overreact to revenue fluctuations, leading to unnecessary workforce adjustments and increased training costs. This study examines how board governance influences firms’ employment sensitivity to revenue fluctuations. Analyzing global board reforms, we find that board reforms significantly reduce managerial overreaction to revenue fluctuations. Utilizing recent difference-in-differences estimators that address heterogeneous treatment effects, we ensure the robustness of our results. The reduction in employment sensitivity is more pronounced when board reforms strengthen the independence of boards and audit committees, particularly in jurisdictions with weaker board efficacy, shareholder, and employment protection legislation. Enhanced effects are observed in firms with initially lower board independence and rapid reform compliance, in entities experiencing greater information asymmetry, marked by higher labor intensity, higher pre-reform agency costs and financial constraints, and in firms led by less experienced CEOs or boards with higher male representation.