This paper provides evidence that returns to hedge fund activism are driven by engagement outcomes. We use a sample of 1,740 activist engagements from 23 countries to estimate performance of activism across North America, Europe and Asia. Striking differences emerge across countries in outcomes...

Previous studies of voting on acquisitions are inconclusive because shareholder approval in the United States is discretionary for management. We study the U.K. where approval is mandatory for deals that exceed a multivariate relative size threshold. We find that in the U.K. shareholders gain 8...

Over the last few years, a series of rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has opened up the European Union to cross-border mobility in incorporation. In this paper we explore how deregulation and the costs of regulation have affected the location decisions of firms. Using a newly...

A growing and deepening divide has opened up between countries where economic development has “taken off” and those caught in a vicious cycle of institutional backwardness and macroeconomic instability. This “Great Divide” is visible in almost every measure of economic performance, such...

This Paper analyses the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy in a general equilibrium model of securities markets and banking with asymmetric information. Banks' optimal asset/liability policy is such that in equilibrium capital adequacy constraints are always binding. Asymmetric...

In an environment characterized by weak contractual enforcement, sovereign lenders can enhance the likelihood of repayment by making their claims more difficult to restructure. We show within a simple model how competition for repayment between lenders may result in sovereign debt that is...

We analyze contagious sovereign debt crises in financially integrated economies. Under financial integration banks optimally diversify their holdings of sovereign debt in an effort to minimize the costs with respect to an individual country's sovereign debt default. While diversification...

We study how relationship lending and transaction lending vary over the business cycle. We develop a model in which relationship banks gather information on their borrowers, which allows them to provide loans for profitable firms during a crisis. Due to the services they provide, operating costs...

This paper analyses the tendency for nations to break up as a result of a trade-off between the aggregate efficiency losses from separation and the redistributive gains to the majority, which can occur in all regions, even when there are no transfers across these regions. We show that...