We present four stylized facts about the Dot Com Era: (1) there was a widespread belief in a Get Big Fast business strategy, (2) the increase and decrease in public and private equity investment was most prominent in the Internet and information technology sectors, (3) the survival rate of dot com firms is on par with or higher than other emerging industries, and (4) firm survival is independent of private equity funding. To connect these findings we offer a herding model that accommodates a divergence between the information and incentives of venture capitalists and their investors. A Get Big Fast belief cascade could have led to overly focused investment in too few Internet startups and, as a result, too little entry.

Previous research finds the volatility implied by S&P 100 index option prices to be a biased and inefficient forecast of future volatility and to contain little or no incremental information beyond that in past realized volatility. In contrast, we find that implied volatility outperforms past volatility in forecasting future volatility and even subsumes the information content of past volatility in some of our specifications. Our results differ from previous studies because we use longer time series and nonoverlapping data. A regime shift around the October 1987 crash explains why implied volatility is more biased in previous work.

We develop an analytical framework to explain firm's choice of equity flotation method and the near disappearance of rights offers by U.S. exchange-listed firms. The choice between uninsured rights, rights with standby underwriting, and firm-commitment underwriting depends on information asymmetries, shareholder characteristics, and direct flotation costs. Underwriter certification and current-shareholder takeup are viewed as substitute mechanisms for minimizing wealth transfers between shareholders and outside investors. Uninsured rights create adverse-selection effects when shareholder takeup is low. Implications for stock-price behavior around issue announcements, shareholder subscription precommitments, and relative issue frequencies are supported by large-sample evidence.

Theoretical models of groups suggest that sub-group usage can affect communication among members and group decision-making. To examine the trade-offs from forming sub-groups, we assemble a detailed dataset on corporate boards (groups) and committees (sub-groups). Boards have increasingly used committees formally staffed entirely by outside directors. Our data show that twenty-five percent of all director meetings occurred in such committees in 1996; this increased to 45% by 2010. Our evidence suggests that granting formal authority to such committees can impair communication and decision-making. Sub-groups are relatively understudied, but our results suggest that they play an important role in group functioning and corporate governance.

This paper assesses different econometric approaches to working with count-based outcome variables and other outcomes with similar distributions, which are increasingly common in corporate finance applications. We demonstrate that the common practice of estimating linear regressions of the log of 1 plus the outcome produces estimates with no natural interpretation that can have the wrong sign in expectation. In contrast, a simple fixed-effects Poisson model produces consistent and reasonably efficient estimates under more general conditions than commonly assumed. We also show through replication of existing papers that economic conclusions can be highly sensitive to the regression model employed.

The more the target knows about the bidder, the more difficult is paying the target with overpriced bidder shares. Thus, when bidders are opportunistic, the fraction of stock in the deal payment will be lower for better informed targets. We test this intuitive prediction against the alternative that stock payments primarily reflect bidder concerns with target adverse selection, which implies a greater fraction of stock in the deal payment for better informed targets. Discriminating between these two mutually exclusive and nested predictions requires measures of target information about the bidder but not of market mispricing. We find that public bidders systematically use more stock in the payment when the target knows more about the bidder. Tests exploiting exogenous variation in bidder market-to-book ratios also fail to support bidder opportunism. Finally, greater potential competition from private bidders is associated with greater propensity for public bidders to pay in cash.

Traditional U.S. industries with higher firm-specific stock return and fundamentals performance heterogeneity use information technology (IT) more intensively and post faster productivity growth in the late 20th century. We argue that this mechanically reflects a wave of Schumpeter's creative destruction disrupting a wide swath of industries, with successful IT adopters unpredictably undermining established firms. This validates endogenous growth theory models of creative destruction and suggests intensified creative destruction as explaining findings associating greater firm-specific performance variation with higher per capita GDPs, economy growth rates, accounting standards, financial system development, and property right protection.

We examine a sample of firms that reset the exercise prices on their executive options. These repricings follow a period of about one year of poor firm-specific performance in which the average firm loses one-fourth of its value. No other offsetting changes to option terms or compensation are made, and many firms reprice more than once. Without repricing, a majority of the options would have been at-the-money within two years. We find that when faced with circumstances in which repricing might be chosen, firms with greater agency problems, smaller size, and insider- dominated boards are more likely to reprice.

We apply the concept of carry, which has been studied almost exclusively in currency markets, to any asset. A security’s expected return is decomposed into its “carry,” an ex-ante and model-free characteristic, and its expected price appreciation. Carry predicts returns cross-sectionally and in time series for a host of different asset classes, including global equities, global bonds, commodities, US Treasuries, credit, and options. Carry is not explained by known predictors of returns from these asset classes, and it captures many of these predictors, providing a unifying framework for return predictability. We reject a generalized version of Uncovered Interest Parity and the Expectations Hypothesis in favor of models with varying risk premia, in which carry strategies are commonly exposed to global recession, liquidity, and volatility risks, though none fully explains carry’s premium.

This study evaluates the relation between hostile takeovers and 17 takeover laws from 1965 to 2014. Using a data set of largely exogenous legal changes, we find that certain takeover laws, such as poison pill and business combination laws, have no discernible impact on hostile activity, while others such as fair price laws have reduced hostile takeovers. We construct a Takeover Index from the laws and find that higher takeover protection is associated with lower firm value, consistent with entrenchment and agency costs. However, conditional on a bid, firms with more protection achieve higher premiums, consistent with increased bargaining power.