Joan Farre-Mensa (NYU) on 'Why Are Most Firms Privately-held?' - Abstract: Even among large U.S. firms, most choose to remain private rather than listing on a stock market. I show that an important reason for this choice is public firms’ inability to disclose information selectively. This leads to a ‘two-audiences’ problem: Disclosure reduces information asymmetries among investors but also potentially benefits product-market competitors. Being public involves a trade-off between this disclosure cost and the benefit of a lower cost of capital due to the greater liquidity with which shares can be traded on a stock market. Using a rich new dataset on private U.S. firms, I show that firms in industries with high disclosure costs and high information asymmetry are more likely to remain private while firms in industries that require a large scale to operate efficiently are more likely to be public. I then establish a new stylized fact: Public firms hold more cash than private firms. This fact is robust to several ways of addressing the endogeneity of the going-public decision, including matching, exploiting within-firm variation, and instrumental variables. Consistent with my model, I find that public firms hoard cash in order to mitigate the disclosure costs associated with raising capital.