Do shareholders of acquiring companies profit from acquisitions, or do acquiring CEOs overbid and destroy shareholder value? Answering this question is difficult since the hypothetical counterfactual is hard to determine. We exploit merger contests to address the identification issue. In those...

We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the corporate governance structure and the division of profits between human and financial capital. In a democratic society where financial wealth is concentrated, a political majority may prefer to restrain governance by...

We argue in favour of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle between the stakeholders about the ultimate...

We argue that the recent corporate governance reform in the Netherlands provides a natural experiment to explore the impact of changes in corporate governance on financing policy. We find that, relative to a control sample of comparable firms outside the Netherlands, Dutch firms significantly...

We characterize the relation between corporate asset structure and capital structure by exploiting variation in the salability of tangible assets. Theory suggests that tangibility increases borrowing capacity because it allows creditors to more easily repossess a firm’’s assets. Tangible...

In this paper we introduce flexibility as an economic concept and apply it to the firm’s security issuance decision and capital structure choice. Flexibility is the ability to make decisions that one thinks are best even when others disagree. The firm’s management values flexibility because...

This study presents a dynamic model for the private equity market in which information revelation and uncertainty rationally explain the cyclical pattern of investment flows into private equity. The net benefit of private equity over public equity is i) uncertain and ii) agents have private...

Boards of directors face the twin task of disciplining and screening executives. To perform these tasks directors do not have detailed information about executives' behaviour, and only infrequently have information about the success or failure of initiated strategies, reorganizations, mergers...

An interlock between two firms occurs if the firms share one or more directors in their boards of directors. We explore the effect of interlocks on firm performance for 101 large Dutch firms using a large and new panel database. We use five different performance measures, and for each...

This paper uses a unified treatment of real options and game theory to examine value appropriation in takeovers within a competitive environment of imperfect information. The integrated model considers a potential target as a shared real option on a bundle of resources. Competing potential...