We analyze initial public offering (IPO) activity under political uncertainty surrounding gubernatorial elections in the United States. There are fewer IPOs originating from a state when it is scheduled to have an election. To establish identification, we develop a neighboring-states method that uses bordering states without elections as a control group. The dampening effect of elections on IPO activity is stronger for firms with more concentrated businesses in their home states, firms that are more dependent on government contracts (particularly state contracts), and harder-to-value firms. This dampening effect is related to lower IPO offer prices (hence, higher costs of capital) during election years.

We examine the formation and evolution of corporate risk culture, that is, the preferences toward risk and uncertainty shared by a firm’s leaders, as well as its effect on corporate policies. We document persistent commonality in risk attitudes inside firms, which arises through the selection of leaders with similar preferences and is rooted in the founders’ risk attitudes. Changes in corporate risk culture over time affect corporate investment policies, whereas cross-sectional differences in founders’ risk attitudes, that is, firms’ initial risk culture, contribute to differences across firms in persistent firm policies, such as research and development intensity.

This article argues that migration and investment from India moved in tandem to chart the evolution of transnational Indian business in the twentieth century, first toward Southeast Asia and Africa and later toward the United States, Europe, and West Asia. With a focus on the banking and diamond sectors, the overseas investment project of the Aditya Birla Group, and the transnational linkages of India's one hundred richest business leaders, the article locates important events, policies, and actors before economic liberalization in 1991 that laid the foundation for subsequent globalization of Indian firms.

We model and test the relations between the team management of mutual funds, managers’ ability, performance, and holdings. Our model predicts that team-managed funds perform better and behave more conservatively than single-manager funds. However, the effect of team management is masked in equilibrium because high-ability managers rationally self-select into single-manager funds. Consistent with the model’s prediction, we find that team-managed funds perform better and deviate less from their benchmark allocations than single-manager funds with the same characteristics. These differences are marked after we control for the endogenous self-selection of managers.

The shape of the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) term structure conveys information about the price of variance risk rather than expected changes in the VIX, a rejection of the expectations hypothesis. The second principal component, SLOPE, summarizes nearly all this information, predicting the excess returns of synthetic Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 variance swaps, VIX futures, and S&P 500 straddles for all maturities and to the exclusion of the rest of the term structure. SLOPE’s predictability is incremental to other proxies for the conditional variance risk premia, economically significant, and inconsistent with standard asset pricing models.

Deleveraging risk is the risk attributable to investing in a security held by levered investors. When there is an aggregate negative shock to the availability of funding capital, securities with a greater presence of levered investors experience extreme return realizations as these investors unwind their positions. Using data on equity loans as a proxy for the degree of levered positions in a given stock, we find robust evidence of deleveraging risk. Stocks with a high degree of short selling experience large positive returns and a decrease in short selling around periods of funding capital scarcity.

This article examines the historical emergence of the Middle East oil-pricing system. The collapse of the Gulf-plus system, combined with outstanding discoveries of new reservoirs across the Arabian Peninsula and Persia, awoke latent competitive forces within the oligopolistic oil industry. After World War II, business differences regarding vertical integration, market priorities, and global competition worsened existing fractures among the multinational oil companies generally referred to as “the seven sisters.” The conclusions underscore the role of the “fringe” companies Texaco, Standard of California–Chevron, and Gulf Oil in prompting new price equilibriums for Persian Gulf crude oil.