India, with its 20 million shareholders, is one of the largest emerging markets in terms of the market capitalization. In order to protect the large investor base, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has enforced a regulation effective from April 2001, requiring mandatory...

We examine wealth effects, for banks and insurers, of bank rights to sell and underwrite annuities. The stock-price reactions to four court and regulatory decisions are consistent with expectations of bank gains at insurers' expense. Cross-sectionally, smaller, riskier insurers with higher...

This paper analyses the evolution of Corporate Governance (CG) mechanisms and organizational changes of the Hellenic Telecommunication Organization (HTO) and has two objectives: to enrich the debate and to contribute to the increasing body of literature by examining and analyzing the...

This study analyzes the interaction of agency problems in public policy and of agency problems inside the firm: it investigates the case of a large privatized firm subject to many policy constraints. The last steps of Telefonica's privatization were designed to promote a disperse ownership and...

We investigate the effect of financial liberalization on the probability of a banking crises in economies with poor transparency We construct a model with imperfect information where banks cannot distinguish between aggregate shocks on the one hand, and government’s policy and firms’...

The study of transparency is increasingly a more topical, broadly relevant, but also more under-researched enterprise. The Asian financial crisis has highlighted not only the welfare consequences of financial sector transparency, sparking a series of yet unresolved debates, but has also linked...

Economists tend to agree that the recent cutting of dividends taxes will encourage investment and reduce financial distress. In addition to creating these “benefits,” however, the tax cut can also increase governance costs. For example, by removing a bias for leveraged capital structures,...

In this article, we provide an interpretation for the voluntary independence requirements contained in the Italian Corporate Governance Code (Preda Code) checking them against a proxy for international best practice, the independence criteria provided in the EC Recommendation on non-executive...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the determinants of multiple-bank lending - one of the main features of the bank-firm relationships in Italy. The analysis suggests that multiple bank lending is significantly and importantly linked with firms’ governance characteristics. In particular, it...

This paper examines the effect of ownership structure on the firm performance for an unbalanced panel of 2478 Indian corporate firms from 1994 to 2000. We examine the effect of interactions between corporate, foreign, institutional, and managerial ownership on firm performance. Using panel data...