This study examines the impact of creditor rights on cash holdings using a sample of firms from 48 countries. We argue that creditor rights affect the willingness of lenders to provide credit, which in turn affects the need for internal liquidity and cash holdings. Consistent with this, we find...

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...

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 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 paper extends research in the field of private equity investments in family firms. It contributes to the literature by fundamentally analyzing the decision criteria of family firm owners for using minority investments of private equity investors. This type of financing might be of great...

This paper investigates the wealth effects of private equity (PE) investor purchases of shares in German quoted companies. It is the first study to analyze these effects for the German market which is particularly interesting due to its distinct characteristics with regard to the ownership...

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...