European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g. unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor insurance mechanisms....

Cash holdings have often been presumed to help resolve the inherent uncertainty of assessing banks. Nonetheless, extant empirical evidence is inconclusive. The present paper adopts a novel approach to assessing the level of stockholder uncertainty associated with the cash holdings reported by...

Cross-ownership breaks the traditional rule of one-sided corporate control. Using a novel approach based on stochastic voting processes, this paper proposes a general method to determine control stakes in the presence of cross-ownership. It offers a generalization of the Banzhaf index, which...

In countries with weak institutions board governance becomes more important. This study uses a unique dataset from listed Sub-Saharan African companies to examine the relationship between ownership composition and board compensation. It further analyses the association between board compensation...

This paper investigates the influence of firm control structure on firm individual economic performance using a unique firm level data set of ownership and balance sheet information. This study fills a gap in the empirical governance literature by investigating whether or not there is...

Complex structure of ownership like cross-ownership, rings, and pyramids are common in Continental Europe, Eastern Europe, and in Asia. This paper aims at dissecting these complex features by a proper measurement of direct and indirect holdings. Building on Brioschi et al. (1989), we use the...

This paper investigates the common patterns of ownership structure across different corporate governance systems. We test the predictions of Zwiebel (1995) using ownership data of Belgian listed companies in 1995 and in 1999. Results show good applicability of the model. This empirical research...

Poor women have complex financial lives. They borrow from a variety of sources. So far, however, research has focussed only on formal borrowing as a source of women’s empowerment. This study examines whether type of borrowing matters to women. We differentiate between ‘easy loans’ – that...

Slow money, or patient nurturing capital invested locally in food and basic industries, is a new term but an old notion. This paper examines the cases of the CIGALES clubs of microangels in France and the more recent case of the slow money alliance to ferret out the basic principles and...

Women entrepreneurs are known not only to reimburse loans swifter than men, but also to receive smaller loans. However, on average women have smaller-scope business projects and are poorer than men. A deeper investigation is thus required in order to assess the existence of gender discrimination...