In a market-based financial system, credit is held by dispersed creditors, and out-of-court renegotiation of debt is more likely to fail because of hold-out problems; in a bank-based system, out-of-court renegotiation stands good chances to succeed. Since out-of-court renegotiation is a...

In this paper we analyze whether discretionary lending increases bank risk. We use a panel dataset of matched bank and borrower data. It offers the chief advantages that we can directly identify soft information in banks’ lending decisions and that we observe ex post defaults of...

We show that the relative seniority of debt and managerial compensation has important implications on the design of remuneration contracts.Whereas the traditional literature assumes that debt is senior to remuneration, we show that this is frequently not the case according to bankruptcy...

This paper contributes to the research on corporate governance by predicting the effects of European takeover regulation.In particular, we investigate whether the recent reforms of takeover regulation in Europe are leading to a harmonization of the national legislations.With the help of 150...

The issue of appropriate corporate governance framework has been a focal point of recent reforms in many countries. This study provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of corporate governance regulatory systems and their evolution over the last 15 years in 30 European countries and the US....

We examine the wealth effects associated with the announcements of convertible debt offerings in the Canadian market for the period between 1991 and 2004.The average wealth effect for the three day event window is a significantly negative -2.7%.This result is in line with previous studies on...

In the corporate finance tradition starting with Berle & Means (1923), corporations should generally be run so as to maximize shareholder value. The agency view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) generally considers CSR as a managerial agency problem and a waste of corporate resources,...

We simultaneously analyze two mechanisms of the managerial labor market: CEO turnover and monetary remuneration schemes.Sample selection models and hazard analyses applied to a random sample of 250 firms listed on the London Stock Exchange over a six-year pre-Cadbury period show that managerial...

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...