Family businesses carry the weight of economic wealth creation in most economies. In the U.S. alone, family businesses account for 80 to 90 percent of the 18-million business enterprises in the United States, and 50 percent of the employment and GNP. In many ways, the family business is...

We analyze the effects of ownership type and concentration on performance of a population of firms in a model large-scale privatization economy. Using specifications based on first-differences and unique instrumental variables, we find that few types of private ownership improve dynamic...

In this article, we provide an interpretation for the voluntary independence requirements contained in the Italian Corporate Governance Code (Preda Code) checking them against a proxy for international best practice, the independence criteria provided in the EC Recommendation on non-executive...

The financial systems in continental Europe are moving from bank intermediation to intermediation by non-bank institutional investors. The present paper examines to what extent this implies a substitution of relationship finance by arm’s length finance or just of one form of relationship...

The financial systems in continental Europe are subject to profound changes in the institutions of market exchange. Banks traditionally holding close relationships with firms are substituted by non-bank institutional investors. The present paper examines whether this implies a substitution of...

In recent years, one area of growing concern in corporate governance is the accounting and transfer of risk using special purpose entities (or trusts). Such entities are used widely in issuing asset-backed securities. This paper provides an overview of the asset-backed securities market, and...

The financial systems in continental Europe are subject to profound changes in the institutions of market exchange. Banks traditionally holding close relationships with firms are substituted by non-bank institutional investors. The present paper examines whether this implies a substitution of...

The present paper proposes to employ a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. We use the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift and estimate the...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the determinants of multiple-bank lending - one of the main features of the bank-firm relationships in Italy. The analysis suggests that multiple bank lending is significantly and importantly linked with firms’ governance characteristics. In particular, it...