We examine how venture capitalists (VCs) adapt their financing strategies when investing in startups that compete against deep-pocketed incumbents. Employing textual analysis to identify a startup’s potential competitors, we show that when competitors are cash-rich, VCs deploy a financing strategy characterized by less conditionality, as observed through larger, less frequent funding rounds that are less contingent on short-term performance. This strategy requires VCs to rely more on continuous monitoring and liquidation protection, and is restricted to larger funds with specialized experience. Our results highlight that product market competition plays an important role in explaining VC financial contracting choices.

This study constructs a firm-level measure of large foreign ownership (LFO) and investigates its impact on stock return volatility in 31 emerging markets. We find a negative relationship between LFO and volatility, even after controlling for potential endogeneity and the impact of major domestic shareholders. This suggests a stabilizing role of LFO in emerging markets, which is consistent with previous suggestions in the literature on the strong commitments and potential monitoring role of large foreign shareholders. Overall, our study highlights the importance of recognizing the heterogeneity among foreign investors and the benefits of large foreign shareholders to emerging stock markets.

This study investigates the relationship between underpricing, ownership structure and post-listing liquidity of initial public offerings (IPOs). It is argued that higher underpricing induces both broader investor participation and creates a more diffuse ownership structure. These two factors are in turn positively associated with the level of post-listing trading, and therefore offer an explanation of how underpricing can influence liquidity. Using a sample of Australian IPOs, we provide evidence of statistically significant relationship between underpricing and various proxies for shareholding distribution and liquidity. This result remains robust after controlling for a number of potential underlying factors that may drive both underpricing and ownership allocation decisions. Overall, our analysis suggests that liquidity is a partial but important benefit of underpricing an IPO.

We investigate whether international operations enhance information links between firms and foreign investors. Exploiting novel subsidiary-level data and within-location variations, we show that, after expanding into another country, a firm attracts greater investment allocation from funds from that country than from other foreign funds. This increase is economically significant, equivalent to one-fifth of the average firm weight in a country-specific portfolio. The observed effect cannot be attributed to funds’ influence, persists even when funds are already familiar with the firm, and helps them generate superior risk-adjusted returns. Our results suggest that firms’ cross-border economic activities contribute to global financial interconnectedness.

This study employs firm-specific announcements as a proxy for information flows and investigates the information–volatility relation using high-frequency data from the Australian Stock Exchange. Our analysis reveals a positive and significant impact of the arrival rate of the selected news variable on the conditional variance of stock returns, even after controlling for the potential effects of trading volume and high opening volatility. Furthermore, the inclusion of the news variable in the conditional variance equation of the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic model also reduces volatility persistence, especially with intraday data. Combined with the evidence that news arrivals display a very strong pattern of autocorrelation, our results are consistent with the Mixture of Distribution Hypothesis, which attributes conditional heteroscedasticity of stock returns to time-dependence in the news arrival process.

We document a novel strategic motive for family business groups to utilize their internal capital markets (ICMs) during financial crises. We find that crisis-period group ICM activity is targeted toward exerting product market dominance over standalone rivals. Groups make significant post-crisis gains in market share that are concentrated among affiliates (and industry segments within affiliates) operating in highly competitive product markets, where capturing such gains is difficult in normal times. These patterns are observed only in emerging markets, suggesting that ICMs enable groups to exploit crises to realize long-term competitive advantages only when rivals face chronic financing frictions.