We analyze the impact of a 75 pct. Break-Through rule on 1,035 European firms with dual class shares. In 3-5 pct. of the firms the controlling owners incur a direct loss of control, whereas in additional 11-17 pct. of the firms the controlling owners are likely to incur a control loss. Firms in...

Recent policy initiatives within the harmonization of European company laws have promoted a so-called "principle of proportionality" through proposals that regulate mechanisms opposing a proportional distribution of ownership and control. We scrutinize the foundation for these initiatives by...

We follow the evolution of ownership structure in a sample of 80 Israeli companies that unified their dual-class shares in the 1990s, and compare it with a control sample of firms that maintained their dual share structure at least until 2000. Our main findings are as follows. First, controlling...

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...

This paper studies whether the monotonicity condition of the investment-cash flow sensitivity is satisfied empirically. We show that if this condition holds, then the point of sample separation does not affect the monotonic relationship between the sensitivities of any two complementary classes...

Classical definitions of complementarity are based on cross price elasticities, and so they do not apply, for example, when goods are free. This context includes many relevant cases such as online newspapers and public attractions. We look for a complementarity notion that does not rely on price...

We propose a novel method to model an agent who is imperfectly attentive in the sense that she may consider only some of the alternatives available. Our methodology departs from the standard 'revealed preference' one: we make plausible assumptions on the values to the imperfectly attentive agent...

We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of catastrophic damages, which we jointly call threshold concerns, on international environmental agreements. We aim to understand whether a threshold for dangerous climate change is as an effective coordination device for countries to overcome...

Standard economic models of groundwater management impose restrictive assumptions regarding perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, observability of individual extraction rates, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we...

This short paper studies the empirical relationship between realized stock returns and bond yields at the 5- and 10-year investment horizons, respectively. Using annual Danish data since 1927, we find that stock returns and bond yields are closely linked in the medium and long term, as we...