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...

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'...

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...

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...

Education’s role in determining worker incomes in China’s rapidly changing urban labor markets is investigated in this paper. Using worker data from a 1999-2000 urban enterprise survey, we examine the effects of education on the current earnings of continuously-employed urban workers,...

Using a unique enterprise-level data set, which covers the regions Moscow City, Chelyabinsk, Krasnoyarsk and Chuvashia and the three sectors manufacturing and mining, construction and trade and distribution, we estimate Russian labour demand equations for the year 1997. The most important...

How valuable are the education and skills acquired under socialism in a market economy? This paper uses data for about 3 million Hungarian wage earners, from 1986 to 1998, to throw light on this question. We find that returns to schooling reach 10 percent early on and remain at this high level....