In a tender offer by a value-increasing raider, voting shareholders face a free-rider problem. However, when they are not atomistic, they do not completely free-ride. In contrast, non-voting shareholders, who are never pivotal for the success of the offer, are absolute free-riders. Hence, in this case there is a gain from departing from one share/one vote. This departure also has a cost; there is an increased vulnerability to value-decreasing raiders, and the optimal governance structure balances the cost and the gain.

We study the liquidity demand of large settlement banks in the UK and its effect on the money markets before and during the subprime crisis of 2007–08. We find that the liquidity demand of large settlement banks experienced a 30% increase in the period immediately following August 9 2007, the day when money markets froze, igniting the crisis. Following this shift, liquidity demand had a precautionary nature in that it rose on days of high payment activity and for banks with greater credit risk. This caused overnight interbank rates to rise, an effect virtually absent in the precrisis period.

When firms compete in the managerial labor market, the choice of corporate governance by a firm affects, and is affected by, the choice of governance by other firms. Firms with weaker governance offer managers more generous incentive compensation, which induces firms with good governance to also overpay their management. Due to this externality, overall level of governance in the economy can be inefficiently low. Poor governance can in fact be employed by incumbent firms to deter entry by new firms. Such corporate governance externalities have important implications for regulatory standards, ownership structure of firms, and the market for corporate control.

We document that the deregulation of bank branching restrictions in the United States triggered a reallocation across sectors, with end effects on state-level volatility. The change cannot be explained simply by shifts in sector-level returns and volatility. A reallocation effect is at play, which we study in the context of mean-variance portfolio theory applied to sectoral returns. We find the reallocation is particularly strong in sectors characterized by young, small and external finance dependent firms, and for states that have a larger share of such sectors. The findings suggest that improving bank access to branching affects the sectoral specialization of output, in a manner that depends on the variance-covariance properties of sectoral returns, rather than on their average only.