We model the employee incentive problem jointly with a firm’s exit decision. Our model predicts that firms in industries where human capital is important are more likely to go public and use high-powered, stock-based compensation. We also show that the higher the management quality, the more likely a firm is to go public than to be acquired. Regarding life cycle, a firm with high capital intensity and/or high management quality will choose to go public at a younger age.

We use a large sample of transaction-level institutional trading data to analyze, for the first time in the literature, the role of institutional investors as producers of information around corporate spin-offs. Our results may be summarized as follows. First, there is a significant imbalance in post-spin-off institutional trading between the equity of new parent firms versus subsidiaries, suggesting that spin-offs increase institutional investors' welfare by relaxing a trading constraint. This imbalance in institutional trading is driven by differences in information asymmetry across the two spun-off firm divisions. Second, institutional trading around spin-offs has significant predictive power for the announcement effect of a spin-off and for post-spin-off long-run stock returns. Third, institutional investors are able to realize significant abnormal profits by trading in the subsidiary firm equity in the first quarter post-spin-off. Overall, we show that spin-offs enhance information production by institutional investors, who profit from this enhanced information production.