Canadian firms have different roots (e.g., more concentrated ownership and smaller size) than U.S. firms and Canadian regulatory enforcement follows a different route (principle- versus rule-based) that embodies the underlying intent of Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX). Financial restatements are more...

This paper examines the impact of shareholding concentration and the class of shareholders on firm investment. We apply the Euler equation approach to the empirical modeling of investment for a panel dataset of 786 Chinese listed companies during 1998–2004. We find that a significant positive...

Using 636 large acquisition attempts that are accompanied by a negative stock price reaction at their announcement (“value-reducing acquisition attempts”) from 1990 to 2010, we find that, in deciding whether to abandon a value-reducing acquisition attempt, managers' sensitivity to the firm's...

Recent studies have debated the impact of investor protection law on corporate behavior and value. I exploit the staggered passage of state securities fraud statutes (“blue sky laws”) in the United States to estimate the causal effects of investor protection law on firm financing decisions...

We develop a model of internal governance where the self-serving actions of top management are limited by the potential reaction of subordinates. We find that internal governance can mitigate agency problems and ensure firms have substantial value, even without any external governance. Internal...

We analyze the structure and evolution of the allocation of decision and control rights in venture capital contracts by using a sample of 464 contracts between venture capitalists (VC) and portfolio firms from Germany. We focus on the evolution of control and decisions rights along three time...

We analyze the degree of contract completeness with respect to staging of venture capital investments using a hand-collected German data set of contract data from 464 rounds into 290 entrepreneurial firms. We distinguish three forms of staging (pure milestone financing, pure round financing and...

In the bank-borrower setting, a firm's existing lender may exploit its positional advantage to extract rents from the firm in subsequent financings. Analogously, a startup's existing venture capital investors (VCs) may dilute the founder through a follow-on financing from these same VCs (an...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly communist countries coupled with detailed “hard” information about the...