While financial institutions' aggregate investments have grown substantially across world equity markets, the size of their individual shareholdings, and ultimately their incentive to monitor, can be limited by the free-rider problem, investment regulations and a preference for diversification...

Theory suggests that controlling shareholders can influence firm value through both shared benefits creation and private benefits consumption. Using negotiated control-block transfers from 31 countries, we look beyond ownership concentration and investigate how controlling shareholder...

Despite the general acceptance of the role of corporate governance, empirical research has remained inconclusive regarding the extent to which individual monitoring mechanisms enhance firm performance and shareholder value. In particular, most previous studies have not convincingly overcome two...

We study a wide-spread yet unexplored corporate governance phenomenon: the pledging of company stock by insiders as collateral for personal bank loans. Utilizing a regulatory change that exogenously decreases pledging, we document a negative causal impact of pledging on shareholder wealth. We...

Using data from 44 countries, we document a new channel through which a family business group's internal capital market supports its members. We find that groups use internal capital to incubate difficult-to-finance projects, making it feasible for them to rapidly scale up, thus facilitating...

One-in-five U.S. high-technology firms are led by CEOs with hands-on innovation experience as inventors. Firms led by “Inventor CEOs” are associated with higher quality innovation, especially when the CEO is a high-impact inventor. During an Inventor CEO's tenure, firms file a greater number...

Using a carefully-constructed global dataset of family business groups, we show that group affiliation moderates corporate investment declines experienced in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. During this period, group internal capital market activity intensifies. The investment activity of group...

Using a sample of large Australian firms from 1994 to 2003, we show that variation in firm-level corporate governance mechanisms plays an important role in explaining a firm's cost of capital. Our empirical results show that greater insider ownership, the presence of institutional blockholders...

Using a dataset of 28,635 firms in 45 countries, this study investigates the motivations for family-controlled business groups. We provide new evidence consistent with the argument that particular group structures emerge not only to perpetuate control, but also to alleviate financing constraints...

We provide evidence that venture capitalists (VCs) strategically enhance their current funds’ interim performance around new fundraising events. Using novel investment-round-level pricing data, we document that, immediately prior to raising another fund, VCs tend to invest in follow-on...