We examine the relationship between the optimal incentive contract and the firm’s decision to fire a manager for poor performance. We first derive some theoretical results using a simple principal-agent model, and then examine the empirical evidence on the incidence of forced turnover among...

Limited liability debt financing of irreversible investments can affect investment timing through an entrepreneur's option value, even after compensating a lender for expected default losses. This non-neutrality of debt arises from an entrepreneur's unique investment opportunity, and it is shown...

The paper examines the interpretation of firms' investment-cash flow sensitivity as an artifact of financial market imperfection. Two alternative explanations of the financial constraints are compared. One is based on informational problems (asymmetric information). The other focuses on limited...

De juridische bescherming van banken en aandeelhouders beïnvloedt de omvang en kwaliteit van het financiële systeem en daarmee de economische groei. Gebrekkige (juridische) instituties in transitie-economieën kunnen de economische ontwikkeling van deze landen dan ook afremmen. Zo dragen...

Technology transfer agreements between universities and industrial companies usually involve royalties, sublicensing considerations and allocation of equity. This article extends the analysis of my previous one ("The Economic Sense of Royalty Rates", ewp-fin/970903)to deal with sublicensing...

Using a large firm level panel data set from four Asian countries, this paper compares the returns to various internal and external funds. A novel feature of our analysis is that we distinguish between financially constrained and unconstrained firms and determine selectivity-corrected estimates...

Interfirm late payments are a hot issue in the EU, as witnessed by the 1998 bills passed in Italy and in the U.K. and by the soon to be approved EU Directive. Comprehensive information, especially on the effective own cost, is however almost absent in the literature. The paper provides the first...

While the aggregate macroeconomic analysis of the recent Asian Crisis highlights the moral hazard problem of bad loans in poorly supervised and regulated East Asian economies, there is very little firm-level analysis to characterize it. The present paper attempts to fill in this gap of the...

Corporate governance (CG) studies have mostly focused on highly dispersed corporations. However, there is an important need for research exploring the governance structure of family-owned firms. The main characteristics that distinguish the family firm from the other types of corporations are...

Despite the seminal work of Claessens et al. (2002), who highlighted the role of ownership structure on firm performance in East Asia, the relationship between capital structure and ownership remains much unexplored. This is important, given recent empirical and theoretical work linking capital...