Do shareholders of acquiring companies profit from acquisitions, or do acquiring CEOs overbidand destroy shareholder value? Answering this question is difficult since the hypotheticalcounterfactual is hard to determine. We exploit merger contests to address the identificationissue. In those...

In criminal cases the task of the judge is to transform the uncertainty about the facts into the certainty of the verdict. In this experiment we examine the relationship between evidence of which the strength is known, subjective probability of guilt and verdict for abstract cases. We look at...

A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....

In this paper we set out the welfare economics based case for imposing cartel penalties on the cartel overcharge rather than on the more conventional bases of revenue or profits (illegal gains). To do this we undertake a systematic comparison of a penalty based on the cartel overcharge with...

Companies planning a private placement typically gauge the interest of potential buyers before the offering is publicly announced. Regulators are concerned with this practice, called wall-crossing, as it might invite insider trading, especially when the potential investors are hedge funds. We...

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...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

We allow the preference of a political majority to determine boththe corporate governance structure and the division of profits betweenhuman and financial capital. In a democratic society where financialwealth is concentrated, a political majority may prefer to restraingovernance by dispersed...

See also the article 'Mean and bold: on separating merger economies from structural efficiency gains in the drinking water sector' 2010, <I>The Journal of the Operational Research Society</I>, 61, 222-34.<P> The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly,...</p></i>

This paper investigates empirically the illiquidity of majority blocks of shares in the context of a search model of block trades. The search model incorporates two aspects of illiquidity, or search frictions. First, upon a liquidity shock, the incumbent blockholders may be forced to sell to a...