This study investigates the growing importance of sustainability in equity markets by estimating whether company commitment to sustainability matters in corporate valuation. The spreading concern for social and environmental issues, and especially for the material risks of climate change,...

In January 2010 the Deutsche Börse Group introduced two family firm stock indices. Both indices are calculated as price and performance indices and extend the number of investment strategy indices of Deutsche Börse Group. The DAXplus Family is an all-share index whereas the DAXplus Family 30...

Recent research indicates that the majority of listed firms in Germany (and also in many other countries around the world) have a dominant owner rather than being widely-held. Hence, owner-dominated firms comprise an important subset of listed companies. This article introduces the concept of an...

An empirical model of managers' demand for agency goods is derived and estimated using the Almost Ideal Demand System of Deaton and Muellbauer (AER 1980). As in Jensen and Meckling (JFE 1976), we derive managers' demand for agency goods by maximizing a managerial utility function where managers...

The climate crisis is inevitably looming over the horizon. Some countries are much more vulnerable than others to its harshest consequences due to their existing issues of poverty and underdevelopment. At the same time, developmental policies pursue economic growth at the cost of environmental...

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 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...

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....

We apply control rights theory to explain the structure and determinants of financial covenants in private equity backed leveraged buyouts. We analyze 130 German transactions from 2000 to 2008, covering about 40 percent of the LBO market during this period. We consider Germany to be a superior...

This paper provides an examination of the ownership structure in Norwegian firms that announced repurchase plans during the period 1999 through 2001, as well as for groups of these firms conditional on whether they actually executed repurchases or not. By using detailed information on various...