Fire sales are forced sales of assets in which high-valuation bidders are sidelined, typically due to debt overhang problems afflicting many specialist bidders simultaneously. We overview theoretical and empirical research on asset fire sales, which shows how they can arise, how they can lead to...

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal...

We provide an autopsy of the patterns of corporate control and ownership concentration in a dataset covering more than 40,000 listed firms from 127 countries over 2004−2012. Employing a plethora of original and secondary sources, big data techniques, and applying the Shapley-Shubik algorithm...