We examine how creditor protection affects firms with different levels of owners' and managers' personal costs of bankruptcy. Theoretically, we show that firms with high personal costs of bankruptcy borrow and invest more under a more debtor-friendly management stay system, whereas firms with...

We develop a model of internal governance where the self-serving actions of top management are limited by the potential reaction of subordinates. Internal governance can mitigate agency problems and ensure that firms have substantial value, even with little or no external governance by...

We examine deal-level data from 395 private equity transactions in Western Europe initiated by large private equity houses during the period 1991 to 2007. We un-lever the deal-level equity return and adjust for un-levered return to quoted peers to extract a measure of abnormal performance of the...

This paper challenges the view that foreign investors lead firms to adopt a short-term orientation and forgo long-term investment. Using a comprehensive sample of publicly listed firms in 30 countries over the period 2001-2010, we find instead that greater foreign institutional ownership fosters...

This study investigates whether business groups can harm the capital allocation efficiency of non-business group firms. From a sample of Korean firms (1987 to 2010), we compute an annual index of the collective strength and dominance of large business groups (LBG) per industry. We find that this...

We find that corporate giving represents a private benefit of control that distorts corporate investment and financing activity, consistent with free cash flow agency theory. Corporate giving discourages managers from pursuing external financing, especially debt issuance, to minimize outside...

We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared to U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results...

We study the impact of institutional investors' “voice” on 201 going private tender offers by controlling shareholders ("freeze-out" offers) in Israel. Israeli regulatory intervention in freeze-out tender offers is relatively mild, thus institutional investors' activism becomes crucial. We...

This study documents the danger of limiting the coverage of mandatory pay disclosure. Exploiting the 2013 rule change in Korea, we find that its restrictive coverage, confined to board members with total annual pay exceeding 500 million Korean won, led a large fraction of executives to evade...

This paper provides an exhaustive literature review of the motives for public-to-private LBO transactions. First, the paper develops the theoretical framework for the potential sources of value creation from going private: a distinction is made between the reduction in shareholder-related agency...