We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

This paper analyses the turnover of board of directors members on a sample of companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in the period 1988-1996. Our aim is to investigate if board members change more frequently when company performance is poor, as the literature suggests, if this relationship...

I analyse the effect of ownership structure and bank control on performance. I employ a unique data set of 715 German takeovers to test whether group structure, large shareholders, and bank control affect their value to shareholders. First, I find that takeovers increase bidder value, but...

This paper analyses ownership and control structures of Dutch listed companies. Legislation effective since 1992 mandates all shareholders with holdings of 5 percent or more in Dutch companies to disclose their holdings. Our analysis shows that the average ownership stakes of the largest and the...

The paper analyzes the optimal structure of board of directors in a firm with ownership concentrated in the hands of a large shareholder who sits on the board. We focus our attention on the choice between one-tier board who performs all tasks and two-tier board where the management board is in...

The first striking feature is that ownership of the average UK company is diffuse: a coalition of at least eight shareholders is required to reach an absolute majority of voting rights. Even though the average firm has a dispersed ownership, the reader should bear in mind that there are about...

This white paper explores a range of potentially attractive partnerships, including those between established US industry members, the entrepreneurial CE (clean energy) community, and the financial industry. These partnerships, include those that can leverage a wide range of entrepreneurial and...

The first part of the paper describes how over time credit rating agencies ceased to play the role of information intermediaries. Rating agencies did not provide information about the risk associated with the securitized instruments, but they simply enabled structurers to create and maintain...

This study surveys the academic and professional literature examining the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with a focus on empirical studies. Privatisation has been instrumental in reducing state ownership in many countries and had a transforming effect on global stock markets,...

Internet resources, extended media coverage and international organizations’ reports recently witness the increasing interest of western banks in new models of finance, particularly Islamic finance and microfinance. This new trend is not only channeled through the frame of corporate social...