This paper examines the relation between cash flow, corporate governance and fixed-investment spending. In perfect capital markets we expect no systematic relationship. However, Myers and Majluf's (1984) asymmetric information hypothesis and Jensen's (1986) managerial discretion hypothesis...

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)...

Abstract: This paper examines how corporate governance and executive compensation affect bank capitalization strategies for an international sample of banks over the 2003-2011 period. ‘Good’ corporate governance, which favors shareholder interests, is found to give rise to lower bank...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the dividend policy of German firms is more flexible than the one of their Anglo-American counterparts.This paper analyses the decision to change the dividend for a panel of 221 German firms from 1984 to 1994.The choice of the period of study is motivated by the...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows, but a higher proportion of their published profits than UK and US firms. We estimate partial adjustment models and report two major findings. First, German firms base their dividend decisions on cash flows rather than published...

Abstract: U.K. company insiders, such as directors, were legally allowed to trade in the shares of their own companies up until the Companies Act of 1980. We investigate the trading behaviour of directors over the period 1893 to 1907 in the U.K. Although insider trading was profitable, we find...

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...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows than UK and US firms.However, on a published profits basis, the pattern is reversed.Company law provisions and accounting policies account for these conflicting results.A partial adjustment model is used to estimate the implicit target...

This study investigates the impact of corporate governance and product market competition on total factor productivity growth for two large samples of German and UK firms. In poorly performing UK firms, the presence of strong outside blockholders lead to substantial increases in productivity....