Francesco Celentano

Francesco Celentano is Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Lausanne. In 2019, Professor Celentano was awarded the Summer Dissertation Fellowship by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Expertise

Professor Celentano is studying how firm intangibility—that is, dependence on intangible assets such as patents and intellectual property—impacts the amount of private information a CEO has and reduces the odds of his or her firm becoming publicly listed. Data on US firms shows that CEOs of public relatively intangible firms are paid more than CEOs of public highly tangible firms, but that highly intangible firms tend more often to be privately owned. These results help explain the heterogeneous increase in CEO remuneration when comparing publicly to privately owned firms and tangible to intangible firms, and also contribute to our understanding of the decrease in the number of publicly listed firms that has been observable over recent decades. Policies aimed at reducing hidden information frictions and increasing the transparency of intangible assets would contribute to reducing market distortions.