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,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of the variation in Czech managers' pay levels. Among the questions we attempt to answer are: Are the managers in state-owned firms compensated differently than those in private owned firms? How much of the difference in pay is explained...

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'...

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...

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...

We use new firm-level data to examine the effects of spinoffs and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, which analyzes spinoffs almost exclusively in advanced economies, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the...

We examine the relations between national cultures, the multinationality of the firm and its holdings of cash. We develop several hypotheses from well known corporate finance theories and theories of the multinational firm, positing that cultural factors as well as the degree of multinationality...

This paper models the credit-seeking behavior of a firm when applying for a bank loan increases the probability of being monitored by the fiscal authorities. Using Russia as an example of an economy with poorly enforced tax payment, I find that if the probability of paying taxes increases as a...

The paper seeks to assess how a major policy regime change – such as the introduction of the currency board in Bulgaria – affects the flow of bank credit to the corporate sector. An attempt is made to identify the determinants of corporate credit separately from the viewpoint of lenders and...

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....