We examine the determinants of cash holdings in private and public companies. Using a sample of more than 280,000 U.K. private firms and 970,000 firm-year observations from the 1994-2010 period we show that cash holdings in private firms support both the trade-off theory and the financing...

Using detailed ownership data for a sample of European commercial banks, we analyze the link between ownership structure and risk in both privately owned and publicly held banks. We consider five categories of shareholders (managers/directors, institutional investors, non-financial companies,...

The phenomenon of “sticky boilerplate” causing inefficient contract terms to persist exists across a variety of commercial contract types. One explanation for this failure to revise suboptimal terms is that the key agents on these transactions, including attorneys and investment bankers, are...

During the 1990s, China's stock market was subordinated to industrial policy and as a result it did not facilitate the privatisation of listed firms. The majority of listed companies' shares were non-tradable and held by state organs. However, since 1997 an off-exchange market in these...

During the 1980s and early half of the 1990s, the entry of new firms, the strengthening of managerial incentives, and the accumulation of non-state assets in the state sector set the stage for China's shareholding experiment, involving the formal conversion of thousands of state-owned...