Open market share repurchases are strictly regulated to prevent companies from profiting from insider information. We examine compliance with these rules in France, where the mandatory disclosure of share repurchases provides detailed information on repurchases actually undertaken. Using a...

Open market share repurchases are strictly regulated to prevent companies from profiting from insider information. We examine compliance with these rules in France, where the mandatory disclosure of share repurchases provides detailed information on repurchases actually undertaken. Using a...

The Paper analyses the political decision that determines the degree of investor protection. We show that entrepreneurs and workers can strike a political agreement by which low investor protection is exchanged for high employment protection. This ‘corporatist’ agreement is feasible if the...

This paper presents a political economy model where there is mutual feedback between investor protection and stock market development. Better investor protection induces companies to issue more equity and thereby leads to a broader stock market. In turn, equity issuance expands the shareholder...

The regulations that shape the design and the operations of corporations, credit and securities markets differ vastly from country to country. In addition, similar regulations are often unequally enforced in different countries. Economists still have an imperfect understanding of why these...

We argue that the choice of corporate governance by a firm affects and is affected by the choice of governance by other firms. Firms with weaker governance give higher payoffs to their management to incentivize them. This forces firms with good governance to also pay their management more than...

If the private benefits of control are high and management owns a small equity stake, managers and workers are natural allies. Two forces are at play. First, managers can transform employees into a 'poison pill' through generous long-term labour contracts and thereby reduce the firm’s...

This paper surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems in Europe. One share-one vote encourages the selection of an efficient management team. Families are the...