This paper investigates determinants and consequences of net asset value discounts in listed private equity funds. Listed private equity funds share characteristics of closed-end mutual funds and traditional unlisted private equity funds and can therefore offer insights into both. Our results...

This paper focuses on the decision to go public when both seller and potential buyers have private benefits of control. The basic model by Zingales (1995) is extended to account for uncertainty of private benefits. This leads to new implications for the sales process, ownership structure,...

This study examines how family firm characteristics affect capital structure decisions. In our analysis we disentangle the influence of three distinct components of a family firm: ownership, supervisory and management board activities by the founding family. Thereby, we use a unique panel...

Based on 1182 dyads of German new ventures and venture capitalists involved in a financing round between 2002 and 2007, we examine the impact of spatial proximity on the likelihood of an investment. We find that with each triplication of journey time the relative likelihood of an investment...

In this paper we address the question whether insider ownership affects corporate performance. Evidence coming from studies dealing with Anglo-Saxon countries is rather inconclusive, especially because it seems that results are significantly affected by endogeneity. Economically, this is due to...

Insider trading studies related to the German market have emphasized that outside investors may earn excess returns by mimicking the transactions of corporate directors. Such a result, provided that it holds, would constitute a serious violation of the efficient market hypothesis. The results...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

This paper examines the impact of SOX on the total cost and the component cost of going public. First, we document a statistically significant increase in non-underwriting expenses of 0.8 percentage points after the introduction of SOX, which is mostly due to an increase in accounting and legal...

Around the world (with the U.S. and U.K. as exceptions) concentrated ownership structures and controlling shareholders are predominant even among listed firms. We provide novel empirical evidence how such controlling shareholders, in particular founding families, affect payout policy decisions....

Market liquidity is the ease of trading an asset. Its risk is the potential loss, because a security can only be traded at high or prohibitive costs. While the omnipresence and importance of market liquidity is widely acknowledged, it has long remained a more or less elusive concept. Treatment...