We find that the location of corporate headquarters significantly affects the firm’s bondholders. Similar to Loughran and Schultz (2006) and others, who show that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies, we look at firms located in large metropolitan cities, small...

This paper investigates the impact of the target chief executive officer's (CEO) postmerger position on the purchase premium and target shareholders' abnormal returns around the announcement of the deal in a sample of bank mergers during the period 1990-2004. We find evidence that the target...

We analyze the takeover premiums paid for a sample of European bank mergers between 1997 and 2007. We find that acquiring banks value profitable, high-growth, and low-risk targets. We also find that the strength of bank regulation and supervision and of deposit insurance regimes in Europe has...

This paper analyzes the determinants of bank acquisitions both within and across 25 members of the European Union (EU-25) during the period 1997-2004. Our results suggest that poorly managed banks (those with a high cost-to-income ratio) and larger banks are more likely to be acquired by other...

This paper studies the impact of European bank mergers and acquisitions on changes in key safety and soundness measures of both acquirers and targets. We find that capitalization, profitability, and liquidity show signs of statistically and economically significant mean reversion for acquirers....

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...

We empirically study the use of value-based management systems in listed German firms and examine implications for firms' stock market performance. Using a novel, hand-collected data set covering 1,083 firm years from 2002 to 2008, we find that value-based management systems become increasingly...

While in the US stock-based incentives are commonly used since the 50s of the last century, in Germany they were invented only some ten years ago. Even in 1996 firms faced considerable regulatory difficulties when willing to grant such incentives. In the meantime the legal environment has...

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...