This paper argues that endogenizing the choice of financing for cash bids is just as important as endogenizing the payment method in takeovers. The paper shows that acquirers issue equity to finance their cash bids only if they lack access to competitive financing. This leads to underbidding and lower takeover premiums. The opposite holds for debt financing, which leads to overbidding. Endogenizing the payment method reveals that equity bids carry lower premiums than cash bids financed at competitive terms. The model's insights find preliminary empirical support and could help explain existing evidence, which seems at odds with prior theory.

We argue that stronger debt enforcement in bankruptcy can reduce indirect costs of financial distress: (i) by increasing the likelihood of restructuring outside bankruptcy and (ii) by improving the recovery rate of stakeholders, such as trade creditors, through explicit legal provisions. Consistent with these predictions, we find that when debt enforcement is stronger, financially distressed firms are less exposed to indirect distress costs in the form of reduced access to trade credit and forgone sales. We document these effects in a panel of firms from 40 countries with heterogeneous debt enforcement characteristics and in differences-in-differences tests exploiting several recent bankruptcy reforms.

We analyze how relationship finance, such as venture capital and relationship lending, affects growth firms' capital structure choices. We show that relationship investors that obtain a strong bargaining position due to their privileged information about the firm, optimally cash in on their dominance by pushing it to finance follow-up investments with equity. The firm underinvests if its owner refuses to accept the associated dilution. However, this problem is mitigated if the firm's initial relationship financing involves high leverage or offers initial investors preferential treatment in liquidation. By contrast, if initial investors are unlikely to gain a dominant position, firms optimally lever up only in later rounds. Our implications for relationship and venture capital financing highlight that the degree of investor dominance is of key importance for growth firms' capital structure decisions.

We analyze whether growth firms should delay current investment to hoard cash in order to reduce dilution from external financing. This hoarding motive is the natural counterpart to saving cash as a precaution to help secure funding for future investment opportunities. However, the two motives lead to fundamentally different implications for hoarding and for how cash interacts with key financial and investment decisions. In particular, our paper contributes to understanding why firms choosing private over public financing hoard less, and why product market competition has an ambivalent impact on the public-private choice.

The voluntary departure of hard-to-replace skilled workers worsens firm prospects, which can prompt additional departures. We develop a model in which firms design compensation to limit the risk of such "worker runs." To achieve cost-efficient retention, firms combine fixed wages with dilutable compensation --- such as vesting equity or bonus pools --- that pays remaining workers more when others leave but gets diluted otherwise. Compensating (identical) workers with differently-structured compensation --- that is, with a different mix of output-dependent and -independent pay --- can further help mitigate the worker run problem by ensuring a critical retention level in a cost-efficient way.

We investigate a seller's strategic choice between optimally-structured negotiations with fewer bidders and an auction with more competing bidders when payments can have a contingent component, as is common in mergers and acquisitions, patent licensing, and employee compensation. The key factor favoring negotiations is that it allows the seller to set her preferred payment structure ---i.e., the revenue-maximizing mix of cash and contingent pay; reserve prices are of secondary importance. Negotiations are more likely to dominate if synergies increase in bidders' productivity types (as with acquirer-target complementarities in M&A). Higher dispersion and magnitude of bidders' private valuations also favor negotiations.

In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence-generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty—nonstandard errors (NSEs). We study NSEs by letting 164 teams test the same hypotheses on the same data. NSEs turn out to be sizable, but smaller for more reproducible or higher rated research. Adding peer-review stages reduces NSEs. We further find that this type of uncertainty is underestimated by participants.

Patent applications often reveal proprietary information to competitors, but does such disclosure harm firms or also benefit them? We develop and empirically support a theory showing that when firms patent enhancements to incumbent, non-disruptive technologies, they can cooperate more easily on these technologies, increasing their profitability. The downside of cooperating on non-disruptive technologies is that the investment in and commitment to disruptive technologies decline. To improve their commitment to disruptive technologies, some firms rely more on trade secrecy. We provide empirical support for these predictions. We document that after a patent reform that made information about patent applications widely accessible, firms cooperate more and charge higher markups. Furthermore, the nature of patented innovation has changed, with the proportion of non-disruptive patents increasing substantially. Finally, while some firms start patenting more, others patent less and rely more on trade secrecy, with the response depending on the attractiveness of firms' innovation prospects.

We show that uninformed speculative trading inflating a firm's stock price can help the firm "fake it till it makes it" by attracting high-quality stakeholders that would not have joined otherwise. Speculators profit from targeting intermediately-transparent firms with highly uncertain prospects, operating in "normal" (neither hot nor turbulent) markets. Unlike speculation inflating prices, short-selling scaring off stakeholders is often unprofitable even when traders have negative information about the firm. Overall, speculative trading is more likely to benefit than harm targeted firms. Uninformed investors can benefit from inflating firms' valuations also in private markets.

The canonical view of bankruptcy law is that it solves a market failure by imposing a collective choice process that supplants the market. We propose that a bankruptcy law instead catalyzes the market if the collective choice process provides scope for rent seeking. Based on a model in which coordination failure is the key friction, as in the canonical theory, we argue that such a law induces activist investing which improves the efficiency of distressed restructuring. We interpret the evolution of Chapter 11 and its surrounding market environment through this lens.

Renewable fixed-term contracts are widespread in executive compensation. This paper studies why these contracts are optimal, what determines their length, and how that length affects managerial behavior. The model relates a contract's length to the period during which dismissing a manager triggers severance pay. Though longer contracts are more costly to terminate, their severance protection can discourage managers from trying to avoid replacement through window dressing or concealing soft information. Thus, the board's choice of contract length balances higher replacement costs with a higher likelihood of window dressing. The predicted determinants of contract length and severance pay are supported empirically.

Institutional investors, such as pension funds, often lack direct access to deals they want to invest in, forcing them to spend billions of dollars on intermediation fees. This paper explains intermediaries' better access to deals with their ability to maintain a reputation for isolating firms from investors' potentially differing strategic objectives. Maintaining such a reputation requires intermediaries to charge non-trivial fees, with competition putting upward pressure on fees. While institutional investors' in-house teams may also develop a reputation, they find it harder. When they do, the proportion of directly invested capital is "wave-shaped" in investors' size. Evidence from institutional investors' investments in alternative assets supports the model's predictions.