Royal Ahold (Koninklijke Ahold NV) was one of the major success stories in the 1990s and is one of the major failures, suffering a complete meltdown, in 2003.We investigate the strategy, accounting transparency and corporate governance of Ahold; elements which jointly drive the firm s performance...

The purpose of this paper is to gather evidence on the success of market forces in promoting investor interests through self-regulation.Corporate governance is a complex mechanism design problem that is both economic and legal/political based.As such there is great interest in whether (and when)...

Abstract: This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting results in the literature concerning the empirical relation between collateral and loan risk. We posit that certain economic characteristics of collateral may be associated with the empirical dominance of different...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...