The governance of infrastructure institutions in the financial markets – namely exchanges, central counter-parties (CCPs), and central securities depositories (CSDs) – has become a matter of significant commercial, regulatory, legislative, and even political concern. Such institutions play a...

We exploit unexpected corporate data breaches to study how firms respond to negative reputation events. Data breaches negatively affect firm profitability, value, and reputation for years following the event, but are not triggered by high or low reputations. In response, firms increase their...

We question previous research assuming that privatizing firm performance generally benefits from decreasing state ownership and the passage of time, both of which purportedly align principal-agent incentives promoting organizational decision-making that increases shareholder value. When state...

Critics of privatization argue that privatization encourages providers to lobby for industry expansion. I argue that this is not generally true when public-sector actors also lobby. Where the effectiveness of advocacy depends on total expenditures, some initial amount of privatization always...

We test competing theoretical perspectives explaining likely shareholder returns from material investment decisions announced by privatizing telecommunications firms ("telecoms") with varying levels of residual state ownership. A "principal-agent" perspective suggests that decrease in residual...

This article argues that it is possible to distinguish between the utility of different institutional structures by comparing the quality service that each typed delivers. As the executive agencies of the new public management are considered to be different from the traditional public sector...

What is the best way to deliver various goods and services in the advanced complex economy? What is the appropriate division of labor among the state, the private for-profit, and the nonprofit sectors? This paper explores these questions relative to the well-being of consumers, and offers a set...

Disappointment with insider trading in Russia, with voucher privatization in the Czech Republic, and with the privatization of infrastructure in many developing countries has spawned new critiques of privatization. How do theory and empirical evidence answer the much-debated questions, Which is...

This study was prepared by Andreas Kuhlmann, while he was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in September 2006 and was accepted as a Ph.D. thesis by the Economics Department of the University of Munich. The subject of this study is the analysis of network...