Using a unique database of 190 newly privatized firms from 36 countries, we investigate the impact of shareholders’ identify on corporate risk-taking behavior. We find strong and robust evidence that state (foreign) ownership is negatively (positively) related to corporate risk-taking....

Cash holdings as a proportion of total assets of U.S. corporations have roughly doubled between 1971 and 2006. Prior research attributes the large cash increase to a rise in firms’ idiosyncratic risk. We investigate two mechanisms by which increased idiosyncratic risk can lead to higher cash...

We study the impact of political institutions on foreign firms’ choice of their U.S. cross-listing venue. Using two measures of political institutions (an index of political rights and a political constraint index) and controlling for various firm-level and country-level characteristics, we...

In this study, we investigate the short run effect of the October 30th, 1995 Quebec referendum on the common stock returns of Quebec firms. Our results show that the uncertainty surrounding the referendum outcome had an impact on stock returns of Quebec firms. We also find that the effect of the...

The new NYSE rules for corporate governance require the audit committee to discuss and review the firm's risk assessment and hedging strategies. They also put additional requirements for the composition and the financial knowledge of the directors sitting on the board and on the audit committee....

It is established that the standard principal-agent model cannot explain the structure of commonly used CEO compensation contracts if CRRA preferences are postulated. However, we demonstrate that this model has potentially a high explanatory power with preferences with decreasing relative risk...

We investigate the empirical relation between competition and corporate governance and the effect of country characteristics on this relation. We find that competition is associated with strong corporate governance, but only in less developed countries. We next examine the impact of corporate...

The book proposes an original contribution to the economics and finance literature by developing the foundations of corporate finance. It also covers in detail various corporate governance issues faced by organizations. The common treatment of corporate finance and corporate governance started...

This paper examines the link between globalization measured by foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio investment (FPI) and privatization of state-owned enterprises in a multi-country sample that focuses on developing countries. We hypothesize that privatization has an effect on...

We extend the contingent claims framework for the levered firm in explicitly modeling the resolution of financial distress under formal bankruptcy as a non-cooperative game between claimants under the supervision of the bankruptcy judge. The identity of the class of claimants proposing the first...