India, with its 20 million shareholders, is one of the largest emerging markets in terms of the market capitalization. In order to protect the large investor base, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has enforced a regulation effective from April 2001, requiring mandatory...

The question of why individual investors want dividends is investigated by submitting a questionnaire to a Dutch investor panel. The respondents indicate that they want dividends partly because the cost of cashing in dividends is lower than the cost of selling shares. Their answers provide...

We examine firm managers' incentives to commit fraud in a model where firms seek funding from investors and investors can monitor firms at a cost in order to get more precise information about firm prospects. We show that fraud incentives are highest when business conditions are good, but not...

Cet essai traite de ce qu’on appelle habituellement les PME ( Petites et Moyennes entreprises, incluant donc les TPE, très petites entreprises). Mais il pose en préambule la question de la pertinence, d’un point de vue économique, de cette catégorie statistique, définie, par exemple,...

The paper aims at outlining the existing gaps in Bulgarian corporate governance compared to the standards and the state of corporate governance in developed market economies. The current state of corporate governance, the degree of ownership concentration as well as the strengths and weaknesses...

Several studies have recommended reliance on subordinated debt as a tool for monitoring banks by investors and for enhancing depositors’ protection. However, subordinated debenture increases the level of leverage and thus the probability of costly failure. We propose a novel financial...

Economists tend to agree that the recent cutting of dividends taxes will encourage investment and reduce financial distress. In addition to creating these “benefits,” however, the tax cut can also increase governance costs. For example, by removing a bias for leveraged capital structures,...

This study analyzes the interaction of agency problems in public policy and of agency problems inside the firm: it investigates the case of a large privatized firm subject to many policy constraints. The last steps of Telefonica's privatization were designed to promote a disperse ownership and...

The paper investigates whether and how performance of regional commercial courts has affected external credit of Russian enterprises between 1995 and 2002. The results show that more reliable courts lead to higher bank lending to firms. This occurs predominantly through expansion of the number...

We investigate the effect of financial liberalization on the probability of a banking crises in economies with poor transparency We construct a model with imperfect information where banks cannot distinguish between aggregate shocks on the one hand, and government’s policy and firms’...