We examine the announcement and post-acquisition share returns of 4,000 acquisitions by U.K. public firms during 1984-1998. We include acquisitions of domestic and cross-border targets, and of both publicly quoted and privately held targets. In acquisitions of domestic public targets, abnormal...

This article analyses the impact of the participation of venture capital (VC) firms on underpricing in 372 businesses brought to IPO during the period 1999-2001 in KOSDAQ. Korea's second-tier stock market, KOSDAQ, has grown dramatically since 1999 and about half of the firms listed in KOSDAQ...

The comply-or-explain principle is a central element of most codes of corporate governance. Originally put forward by the Cadbury Committee in the UK as a practical means of establishing a code of corporate governance whilst avoiding an inflexible ‘one size fits all’ approach, it has since...

In the wake of the financial crisis, shareholders are increasingly relied upon to monitor directors. But while much has been written about directors' flawed judgments, remarkably little is known about shareholders' ability to make accurate judgments. What determines whether shareholders make the...

Fund managers are the primary investment decision-makers in the stock market, and corporate executives are their primary sources of information. Meetings between the two are therefore central to stock market investment decisions but are surprisingly under-researched. There is little in the...

This paper comprises the long introduction to the symposium of five papers on financial globalisation published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, volume 34, no 2. The paper discusses the impact of financial globalisation in a variety of spheres and shows how the five papers link together to...

This paper provides a review and commentary on the current financial and economic crisis. It considers important analytical and policy issues from a global and North-South perspective. The analytical questions cover issues such as the better than expected performance of the world economy, the...

Cross-national regulatory differences in safety, price and intellectual property protection are an inherent feature of the operating environment of the global pharmaceutical firm. Institutional, transaction cost and more recent ‘race to the bottom’ theories assume that regulation represents...

This paper analyses the growth of employment in China during the post reform period. It argues that the Chinese experience with export-led growth provides an excellent example of the phenomenon of a vent for surplus productive capacity provided by exports, identified by Adam Smith in the Wealth...

Over recent years, a number of regulators have launched proposals to expand the obligation to disclose major share ownership in listed companies. This article shows that these are not stand-alone developments. Using a unique dataset comprising data from 25 countries over 11 years (1995-2005) and...