Unlike their public counterparts private firms do not hold large precautionary cash reserves. This is surprising particularly in light of the fact that among public firms those that are small and have worse access to capital that is those that look the most like private firms hold the most precautionary cash. Author Abstract I document that public.
U.S. firms hold twice as much cash as large privately held firms a surprising finding that is robust to three alternative identification strategies matching within firm variation and instrumental variable. Public firms greater access to capital accounts for about one quarter of the difference. The remainder can be explained by differences in the extent to which public and private firms engage in market timing in response to misvaluation shocks. I show that the risk of misvaluation induces public firms Chinese Overseas America Number Data to raise capital and accumulate cash reserves when they perceive their equity to be overvalued resulting in greater demand for precautionary cash holdings. Paper Information Isolated Drunk And Negotiating With The Kgb In Bruce Allyn Negotiating with the KGB negotiation expert James Sebenius tells the story of a Harvard grad student who during the Cold War finds himself in a high pressure high stakes negotiation with the Russian spy agency trying to hire him.
To secretly work for the KGB the agent tries many approaches barely veiled threats offers of money and the promise of high level access and Soviet documents that would enable Allyn over time to become the top U.S. Sovietologist. What will he do We Don t Always Learn From Failure Management experts often tout failure as a wonderful way for trainees to learn the ropes of their craft. The new working paper My Bad How Internal Attribution and Ambiguity of Responsibility Affect Learning from Failure shows the shortcomings of this approach.