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...

We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

Real option theory has remained a fringe field; practitioners believe it is not practically applicable in complex real world environments. We show that this view is mistaken. We apply real option theory to a highly complex energy problem with unhedgeable risk, time varying volatilities and...

This paper shows that the presence of conditional staging in R&D (Research & Development) has a critical impact on portfolio risk, and changes diversification arguments when a portfolio is constructed. When R&D projects exhibit option-like characteristics, correlation between projects plays a...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612310000176"><I>Finance Research Letters</I></A>, 7(2), 127-34.<P>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...</p></i></a>

In a cross-border takeover, the tax base associated with future capital gains is transferred from target shareholders to acquirer shareholders. Crosscountry differences in capital gains tax rates enable us to estimate the discount in target valuation on account of future capital gains. A one...

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 study the role of private equity firms in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. We find that private equity-owned firms are more likely to become targets in crossborderM&A transactions. This effect is particularly strong in transactions where the target or its shareholders actively reach out...

Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...