This article makes two important contributions to the literature on the incentive effects of insider ownership. First, it presents a clean method for separating the positive wealth effect of insider ownership from the negative entrenchment effect, which can be applied to samples of companies...

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves, and that these waves are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We test four hypotheses that have been advanced to explain merger waves: the industry shocks, q-, overvaluation and managerial...

We use investment-cash flow regressions to show that both asymmetric-information and agency problems are more severe in Continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon countries leading to too little investment by firms with attractive investment opportunities and too much by those with poor...

This paper takes a look at the effects of mergers in continental Europe over the past 15 years. We use a large panel of data on mergers to test several hypotheses. The effects of the mergers are examined by comparing the performance of the merging firms with control groups of non-merging and/or...

We shed light on three conundrums in the literature on investment: why investments out of different sources of finance earn different returns, why different studies report different patterns of returns across sources of finance, and why companies in developing countries make greater use of...

This survey gives an overview of the current state of knowledge on the question of whether corporate-governance structures worldwide are determinants of differences in economic performance. We look at the identities of owners, monitoring boards, and legal systems and find that some, though not...