Because IPO mechanisms determine both the initial trading price and the allocation of newly-listed firms' shares, they have financial and strategic consequences for shareholders. For that reason, it is of interest to analyse the relative advantages and disadvantages of the different procedures...

Based on a sample of 15 European countries, this survey analyses various features of the European IPO (Initial Public Offering) market over the period from 1995 to 2004: listing requirements, IPO-mechanism choices, performance and secondary market liquidity. First, the comparison of national...

We investigate the link between employee ownership and price levels of stocks. Using a comprehensive sample of firms in the Société des Bourses Françaises (SBF) 120 Index from 2000 to 2007, we document a negative correlation between share price levels and employee ownership. This suggests...

In the theoretical framework of corporate governance this article studies the efficiency of the control exerted by the ownership structure and the board of directors on managers. The confrontation of entrenchment theory and agency theory allows to determine the necessary conditions of the...

We analyse the reasons why companies issue units when they raise additional capital. In contrast to previous evidence, our results show that units are not offered to mitigate the agency conflicts or to signal security mispricing as they are predominantly issued during cold periods, in public...

We consider the problem of optimal risk sharing of some given total risk between two economic agents characterized by law-invariant monetary utility functions or equivalently, law-invariant risk measures. We first prove existence of an optimal risk sharing allocation which is in addition...

This article looks at the Enron affair in terms of what investors and experts fail to take into account to being able to predict Enron collapse. The authors show how analysts could have predicted Enron's difficulties in view of the incoherence observed in its strategic decisions, from the...

We provide new rationales for corporate venturing (CV), based on competition for talented managers. As returns to venturing increase, firms engage in CV for reasons other than capturing these returns. First, higher venturing returns increase managerial compensation, to which firms respond by...