Royal Ahold (Koninklijke Ahold NV) was one of the major success stories in the 1990s and is one of the major failures, suffering a complete meltdown, in 2003.We investigate the strategy, accounting transparency and corporate governance of Ahold; elements which jointly drive the firm s performance...

The purpose of this paper is to gather evidence on the success of market forces in promoting investor interests through self-regulation.Corporate governance is a complex mechanism design problem that is both economic and legal/political based.As such there is great interest in whether (and when)...

This paper examines the choice between two rights-preserving issue methods of seasoned equity offers in the UK as well as the factors determining the offer price and stock market announcement reactions.Firstly, equity issues in the UK are underwritten for different reasons than in other...

In this study we investigate the role of leverage in disciplining overinvestment problems.We measure the relationships between leverage, Tobin s q and corporate governance characteristics for Dutch listed firms.Besides, our empirical analysis tests for determinants of leverage from tax and...

We investigate small firms’ capital structure, employing a proprietary database containing financial statements of Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from 2003 to 2005. We find that the capital structure decision of Dutch SMEs is consistent with the pecking order theory: SMEs use...

In this paper we empirically investigate the determinants of leverage and agency problems and we examine the relationships between leverage and agency problems. As in Titman and Wessels (1988) we use structural equations modeling with latent variables. In contrast to Titman and Wessels (1988),...

We consider a model in which the principal-agent relation between inside shareholders and the management affects the firm value.We study the effect of financing the project with risky debt in changing the incentive for a risk-neutral shareholder (the principal) to implement the project-value...

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of thin capitalization rules that limit the tax deductibility of interest on the capital structure of the foreign affiliates of US multinationals. We construct a new data set on thin capitalization rules in 54 countries for the period 1982-2004. Using...