This paper explores how affiliates of multinational corporations save liquidity when facing a transitory cash-flow shock. For this a panel is first built of non-publicly traded copper mines in South America between 2001 and 2012, most of them set up as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). This...

This paper documents recent structural changes in China's corporate landscape, based on company level data, providing a complementary perspective to that of official Chinese statistics. We classify China's largest companies by revenue since 2004 (based on Fortune Global 500 rankings), and...

This paper examines the impact of capital gains taxation on firms’ investment and financing decisions. We develop a real options model in which the timing of investment, the decision to default, and the firm’s capital structure are endogenouslyand jointly determined. Our analysis shows that...

We test one of the main predictions of the financial flexibility paradigm that expectations about future firm-specific shocks affect the firm's leverage. We extract the expectations of small and large future shocks from the market prices of equity options. We find that expectations for future...

We study the relationship between corporate debt, corporate risk and firm-level investment, using a sample of 25,000 listed companies across 47 countries over the last two decades. We find higher leverage reduces investment but show the effect varies with risk, as measured by firm time-varying...

This paper discusses the most important theoretical contributions to the literature on privatization, focusing on emerging economies, and gives a summary on recent research concerning the ways privatization might affect the development of securities markets. In addition, the paper provides a...

This paper examines the restructuring of state assets in markets deregulated by privatizations and investment liberalizations. We show that the government has a stronger incentive to restructure than the buyer: A firm restructuring only takes into account how much its own profit will increase....

We investigate the impact of differences in privatisation method on national economic performance in transition economies. Our approach is to estimate, using dynamic panel data methods, a growth equation over 23 countries for the period 1990-2001. Among our results, we find that mass...

Ever since India decided to globalize, concentrated effort was made to attract Japanese participation through foreign direct investment. However, response from Japan has been rather subdued. This paper attempts to gain some insight into this reluctance of Japanese investors by studying the...

Are national or multinational firms better lobbyists? This paper analyzes the extent of national environmental regulation when policy is determined in a lobbying game between a government and firm. We compare the resulting regulation levels for national and multinational firms. We identify three...