The rapidly growing literature studying the relationship between legal origin, investor protection, and finance has stimulated an important debate in academic circles. It has also generated a number of applied research projects and strong policy statements. This paper discusses the implications,...

Business corporations seek profit. That is, after subtracting cost, they maximize net revenue. Spillovers (both costs and benefits) involve trade-offs governing boards should make. Spillovers, especially when coupled with clumsy applications of discounted present value, distort a business'...

Capital markets perform two distinct functions: provision of capital and facilitation of good governance through information production and monitoring. I argue that the governance function has more impact on the efficiency with which resources are utilized within the firm. Based on industry...

This study compares the characteristics and the price behavior of case-by-case privatization initial public offerings, private sector initial public offerings and the mass privatization program in Poland over the first eight years after the reopening of the Warsaw Stock Exchange in April 1991....

The article presents a simple agency model of the relationship between corporate valuation and insider trading laws. The article then investigates the model’s three testable hypotheses using firm-level data from a cross-section of developed countries. I find that more stringent insider trading...

This paper documents that law affects finance in emerging markets through the methods used by controlling shareholders to “tunnel” wealth out of the firm. We find that Bulgarian securities law enabled financial tunneling via dilution and freeze-out tender offers. During the period 1999-...

Using a sample of 2,827 firms from 21 countries we examine whether insider trading laws achieve the primary objective for which they are introduced – protecting uninformed investors from private information-based trading. We find that when control is concentrated in the hands of a large...

Despite the longstanding insider trading debate, there is little empirical research on insider trading laws, especially in a comparative context. The article attempts to fill that gap. I find that countries with more prohibitive insider trading laws have more diffuse equity ownership, more...

Research reported by Thomas Homer-Dixon characterizes five social effects that can significantly increase the likelihood of violence in the emerging world, effects that are far deeper than can be controlled by security forces: (1) constrained agricultural production, often in ecologically...

In explaining the corporate governance performance of post-socialist companies, this article identifies four factors of influence: (1) pressure from majority shareholders, (2) pressure from outside minority shareholders, (3) pressure resulting from internationalization/ globalization and (4)...