We use new firm-level data to examine the effects of spinoffs and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, which analyzes spinoffs almost exclusively in advanced economies, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the...

External agents are frequently characterized as necessary for efficiency in team production settings. At the same time, these agents must be constrained from opportunistically exercising their enforcement capabilities. I argue that collective action costs and formal institutions (e.g., golden...

In recent years the number of going private transactions has sharply increased in emerging markets. The purpose of this study is to establish the financial characteristics of companies that have gone private using a dataset comprising of Polish companies. We use a probit model to distinguish the...

This paper examines the effect of ownership structure on the firm performance for an unbalanced panel of 2478 Indian corporate firms from 1994 to 2000. We examine the effect of interactions between corporate, foreign, institutional, and managerial ownership on firm performance. Using panel data...

This study investigates the firm financing patterns in India and the role of corporate governance mechanisms. We use firm-level time series data of nearly 2000 listed companies from 1994 through 2000, to analyze the firm’s corporate financing behavior in connection with its corporate...

Conviction rates in Japan exceed 99 percent -- why? On the one hand, because Japanese prosecutors are badly understaffed they may prosecute only their strongest cases and present judges only with the most obviously guilty defendants. On the other, because Japanese judges can be reassigned by the...

In this paper we explain the prevalence of explicit contracts of employment, particularly those that embody high- rather than low-powered incentives and clauses that supersede the common law defaults. Our analysis is based on an understanding of two fundamental problems that arise when agency...

Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...