This study examines factors influencing full (FP) versus partial (PP) privatization and how markets respond to government control in PP and FP firms. Exploiting China's 2005 NTS reform as a natural experiment, we find that treated PP firms experienced significantly lower post-reform performance,...

Does the introduction of corporate transparency and disclosure rules in emerging economies affect compliance, and therefore earnings quality and firm performance? We explore these questions for an important emerging economy, Russia, using a natural experiment, the 2002 introduction of Russian...

We study the potential benefits and mechanisms of firms' political connections by analyzing the Italian experience, where, in the early nineties, Silvio Berlusconi, a rich TV tycoon, became the leader of the conservative political coalition. Using firm-level data, we find that the 101 companies...

Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

The capital-to-labor ratio has steadily risen in the U.S. and elsewhere during the post-WWII period. Since the 1970s this rise has been accompanied by a rise in the level and variability of corporate profits whereas the labor share of income has declined. In this paper we ask whether these...

The U.S. trucking industry has been calling out a shortage of truck drivers for nearly forty years, since soon after its economic deregulation in 1980. Burks and Monaco (2019) provided evidence that the overall truck driver labor market works about as well as any blue collar labor market, and...

Drawing on principal-agent perspectives on corporate governance, this paper examines whether employees' hourly pay is linked to ownership dispersion. Using linked workplace-worker data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, we find average hourly pay is higher in...

This paper empirically examines firm owners' gender difference in labor demand. We estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of female ownership on employment of the firm using the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS), provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Because...

This paper examines if ownership control - the share of largest owner in the firm - explains the difference in the adoption of management best practices between Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and rest-of-the-world (ROW). Using a sample of 156,833 firms from 130 countries, of which 25,005 are in SSA,...

Corporate governance literature argues that board diversity is potentially positively related to firm performance. This study examines the relationship in the case of women in top executive jobs and on boards of directors. We use data for the 2500 largest Danish firms observed during the period...