This paper investigates the mechanisms that firms use to get state favors. We focus on a less well studied but common mechanism: business owners seeking election to top office. Using Thailand as a research setting, we find that business owners who rely on government concessions or are wealthier...

We analyse controlling owners incentive to provide non-controlling owners with better protection against self-dealing through offering new shares with tag-along rights, - the private contracting alternative to equal price provision in takeover legislation. Our model identifies two counteracting...

Many corporations reward their outside directors with a modest fee for each board meeting they attend. Using two non-overlapping data sets on director attendance behavior, we provide robust evidence that directors are less likely to have attendance problems at board meetings when board meeting...

This paper analyzes family-owned banks in Thailand. Using the data before the financial crisis, we find that wealthy families extensively use pyramids to control a business empire which includes financial and non-financial firms. We analyze the entire family group structure and find that...

This paper reviews the evolution of the Japanese banking sector and the development of the banking crisis in Japan in the context of "too big to fail." It describes the deterioration of the Japanese financial sector caused by the bad loan problems and the failure of policymakers to get a grip on...

We examine the diversification patterns of almost all publicly listed non-financial companies in China during the 2001 to 2005 period. More than 70 percent of the firms in our sample are diversified. We document that patterns of diversification strongly depend on firms' political connections....

This paper shows that pyramidal ownership can be used to control downside risk. The research setting is Thailand before and after the 1997 Asian crisis. The focus is on family business groups that owned banks. The results show that the controlling family pursues different investment strategies...