The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union (EU) initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers,...

The paper analyzes the interplay of product market competition and governance on CEO compensation in Italian listed firms from 2000 to 2011 and tests the impact of the 2007-08 financial crisis on pay-performance sensitivity. We argue that important differences both in the level of compensation...

Repatriation taxes reduce the competitiveness of multinational firms from tax credit countries when bidding for targets in low tax countries. This comparative disadvantage with respect to bidders from exemption countries violates ownership neutrality, which results in production inefficiencies...

This paper presents estimates from a latent variables model of the relation between corporate governance and financial performance. We use data on large US corporations to estimate the correlation, conditional on the firms' investment opportunity set, between governance and performance. We find...

Ownership takeovers often follow complex strategies where the control of the target firm is acquired through a sequence of independent contracts. Based on this observation, we develop a novel theoretical model wherein the acquiring firm decides on the number of steps towards the full ownership...

The increasing pervasiveness of technology-driven firms that offer banking services has led to a growing pressure on traditional banks to modernize their core business activities. Banks attempt to confront the challenges of digitalization by cooperating with financial technology firms (fintechs)...

We conduct an empirical investigation into the effects of foreign ownership on worker skills using firm-level data from Spain. To control for endogeneity bias due to selection into foreign ownership, we combine a difference-in-differences approach with a propensity score weighting estimator. Our...

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

This paper describes the trends in foreign bank ownership across the world and presents, for the first time, empirical evidence of the causes of multinational banks' exits from other countries. Using panel data for 149 closed or divested foreign bank subsidiaries across 54 countries from 1997 to...