A two-stage stock-financed merger occurs when an acquiring firm first issues shares, and then engages in a cash acquisition shortly afterward. Such deals allow us to test two important hypotheses derived from decoupling: by clienteles via segmentation and by time. The acquirer's value is maximized by selling shares to investors preferring to hold them, and use the raised cash to pay the target shareholders (the decoupling by clienteles hypothesis). Two-stage deals also provide an option to the acquirers by allowing them to decouple their own shares from the correlated target's shares by issuing at an earlier date and wait for good acquisition opportunities (the time decoupling hypothesis). We find empirical evidence in support of both hypotheses.

This paper attempts to shed some light on the role of financial sector policies in generating new knowledge, drawing on the experience of one of the fastest growing and largest developing countries. Using time series data for India over the period 1963–2005, the results indicate that interest rate restraints help generate ideas. Other financial repressionist policies, in the form of high reserve and liquidity requirements, as well as significant directed credit controls, appear to have a dampening effect on ideas production. These results lend some support to the argument that some form of financial sector reforms may help stimulate economic growth via increasing technological innovation.

This paper explores the determinants of financial development by focusing on the role played by barriers to the diffusion of financial technology. These barriers are measured using human genetic distance from the technology frontier. The results based on cross-sectional data for 123 countries suggest that genetic distance to the global frontier has an economically and statistically significant effect on financial development, in that countries that are genetically far from the technology leader tend to have lower levels of financial development. Genetic distance is found to have the largest effect, even after controlling for other determinants of financial development established in the literature. These findings indicate that cultural barriers to the diffusion of financial technology across borders impact financial development by influencing the follower countries’ ability to adopt and adapt innovations from the frontier.

We examine the impact of familiarity with business segments on CEOs' divestment decisions. We find CEOs are less likely to divest assets from familiar than from non-familiar segments. We attribute this effect to CEOs' comparative information advantage with respect to familiar segments. Consistent with this information advantage, we document that the familiarity effect is particularly strong in R&D intensive industries. We further find the familiarity effect to be most pronounced for longer-tenured CEOs who have built up sufficient political power over the course of several years in office to enable implementation of their preferred divestment choices. We also document the value effects of divestments and show that familiarity affects returns on divestment announcements.

Using a unique and rich database of high-technology firms in China, we show that effective enforcement of intellectual property rights at the provincial level is critical in encouraging financing and investing in R&D. Better enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights positively affects firms' ability to acquire new external debt and allows firms to invest in more R&D, generate more innovation patents, and produce more sales from new products. Our results suggest that facilitating financing and investing in R&D are the channels through which better IP rights enforcement can affect economic growth.