Knowledge that Transforms

This paper analyses the determinants of venture capital for a sample of 21 countries. In particular, we consider the importance of initial public offerings (IPOs), gross domestic product (GDP) and market capitalization growth, labor market rigidities, accounting standards, private pension funds, and government programs. We find that IPOs are the strongest driver of venture capital investing. Private pension fund levels are a significant determinant over time but not across countries. Surprisingly, GDP and market capitalization growth are not significant. Government policies can have a strong impact, both by setting the regulatory stage, and by galvanizing investment during downturns. Finally, we also show that different types of venture capital financing are affected differently by these factors. In particular, early stage venture capital investing is negatively impacted by labor market rigidities, while later stage is not. IPOs have no effect on early stage venture capital investing across countries, but are a significant determinant of later stage venture capital investing across countries. Finally, government funded venture capital has different sensitivities to the determinants of venture capital than non-government funded venture capital. Our insights emphasize the need for a more differentiated approach to venture capital, both from a research as well as from a policy perspective. We feel that while later stage venture capital investing is well understood, early stage and government funded investments still require more extensive research.

The petrochemical industry employs assets subject to temporal and site specificity. The OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s made it difficult to write contracts covering business dealings in the industry. I use this production and economic setting as a natural experiment to test transaction cost theory. In support of the theory, I find that input price uncertainty in the 1970s positively affected the extent of vertical integration by firms into input stages. Moreover, the positive reaction of vertical integration to price uncertainty mainly occurs in transactions subject to asset specificity. I also examine price controls and market power as alternative explanations for vertical integration in the industry, but fail to find support for these hypotheses.

We examine research and development (R&D) agreements between government agencies and other organizations. Consistent with theories of contractual “hold up,” contracts are longer and more complete when the parties envision a joint product as opposed to when they merely plan to share information. Contracts are less complete when the parties have an ongoing business relationship, suggesting an interaction between reputation and explicit contracting. While our experiment cannot dismiss the possibility that these empirical regularities simply reflect the nature of the parties' joint investment, the findings are consistent with arguments that theories of contracting for tangible inputs also pertain to R&D.

This study shows that shareholders of a firm that divests assets receive gains that are significantly related to stock ownership by the firm's managers and to the proportion of outside directors on the firm's board when the divestiture produces positive total dollar gains. Our results agree with the notions that higher levels of ownership give managers the incentive to sell assets that create negative synergies, the incentive to negotiate the best price for shareholders, and that outside directors fulfill their responsibilities as effective monitors and advisors to management.

Myers and Majluf [Myers, S.C., Majluf, N.S., 1984. Corporate financing and investment decisions when firms have information that investors do not have. Journal of Financial Economics 13, 187–221.] showed that mispriced securities can lead managers with private information to invest inefficiently. It seems plausible that this problem would disappear in a fully revealing equilibrium, since information asymmetries are resolved and securities are priced correctly. In fact, Constantinides and Grundy [Constantinides, G.M., Grundy, B.D., 1989. Optimal investment with stock repurchase and financing as signals. Review of Financial Studies 2, 445–465.] claim that, in their model, any fully revealing equilibrium has efficient investment. This claim is incorrect, as infinitely many inefficient equilibria exist for the very example they work out. The inefficient outcomes survive the standard signaling-game equilibrium refinements. There are also examples that have fully revealing equilibria with inefficient investment but none with efficient investment.

This study analyzes corporate expenditures for property, plant and equipment (PP&E), and research and development (R&D) for over 2500 US firms from 1988 to 1994. We find no support for the contention that institutional investors cause corporate managers to behave myopically. Indeed, we document a positive relation between industry-adjusted expenditures for PP&E and R&D and the fraction of shares owned by institutional investors. This relation is robust to a variety of empirical tests, including those that account for endogeneity between institutional ownership and firm-level discretionary expenditures.

Optimal ownership structure is an important issue in corporate governance debates. This study uses piece-wise regression analysis to examine the impact of ownership structure on the risk of CEO compensation. We show that when the CEO and the board of directors control low levels of voting stock (i.e., below 13% of total shares) increases in ownership are positively related to CEO compensation risk. For ownership levels above 13% but below 22%, increases in ownership are negatively related to CEO compensation risk. This evidence provides a partial explanation for the non-monotonic relationship between Tobin's Q and management ownership observed by Morck et al. (1988) [Morck, R., Shleifer, A., Vishny, R., 1988. Management ownership and market valuation: an empirical analysis, Journal of Financial Economics 20 (1988) 293–316.].

This paper uses a law and finance approach to develop a new takeover theory that formalizes the idea that large target shareholders, who can block a takeover attempt, exercise a strategic influence on tender offer prices, and thereby, on the distribution of the takeover gain. The theory captures the interaction between legal rules, target ownership structure, bidder toehold and potential effects of arbitrageurs in an endogenously determined bargaining parameter that predicts a skewed distribution of the gain in favor of target shareholders. In a regression model, the parameter has significant explanatory power, specifically when the total takeover gain is positive.

We study the acquisition and divestiture activity of a sample of 1305 firms from 59 industries during the 1990–1999 period. Consistent with the importance of restructuring activity during the 1990s, we find that half of the sample firms are acquired or engage in a major divestiture. Consistent with the notion that economic change is a source of the observed restructuring activity, we find significant industry clustering in both acquisitions and divestitures. We also study the announcement effects of the two forms of restructuring and find that both acquisitions and divestitures in the 1990s increase shareholder wealth. Moreover, the wealth effects for both acquisitions and divestitures are directly related to the relative size of the event. The symmetric, positive wealth effects for acquisitions and divestitures are consistent with a synergistic explanation for both forms of restructuring and are inconsistent with nonsynergistic models based on entrenchment, empire building and hubris.