Research in the News

Profs Asker & Ljungqvist's research on investments by private vs. public companies

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "Investors depend on long-term returns from stocks to fund their retirements. What a nasty irony, therefore, that public ownership gives company managers reason to favour short-term profits over long-term growth. In a recent paper, John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa and Alexander Ljungqvist – researchers at New York University and Harvard – find new evidence of this. They compare investment levels at a large sample of private and publicly traded companies over a decade. They find that the private ones invest more than the public ones, growing their total assets by, on average, 6.8 per cent a year versus 3.7 per cent."

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Additional coverage appeared on the Financial Times and Forbes.