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...

This paper deals with the economics of secondary markets for government bonds. Ultimately, the analysis is shaped by a public policy goal: assessing the elements of a regulatory framework for these markets. In that regard, the decisive role of market structure leads to a critical review of...

Traditional merger analysis, based on market definition and use of concentration measures to infer potential anti-competitive effects, is problematic and difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products. This paper discusses an alternative which consists...

(forthcoming Journal of Political Economy). Part ownership of a takeover target can help a bidder win a takeover auction, often at a low price. A bidder with a "toehold" bids aggressively in a standard ascending auction because its offers are both bids for the remaining shares and asks for its...

As the valuation of strategic measures becomes increasingly important, relatively few articles have discussed the valuation methods pertained for joint ventures. This paper shows that real options contribute to a better valuation of joint venture projects through superior reflection of the value...

In recent years the number of going private transactions has sharply increased in emerging markets. The purpose of this study is to establish the financial characteristics of companies that have gone private using a dataset comprising of Polish companies. We use a probit model to distinguish the...

We seek to contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993–2000 on 49 nations....

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...

A Central Counterparty (CCP) is an entity that interposes itself between transacting counterparties – a seller vis-à-vis the original buyer and a buyer vis-àvis the original seller – to quarantee execution of the transaction. Thus, the original transacting parties substitute their...

This paper examines the performances of Asian asset management companies (AMCs). The analysis reveals that AMCs vary in their design and performance. Asset management companies can trigger moral hazard- inspired bank lending. Empirical examination of the Thai experience reveals that the moral...