Tax codes regularly create conflicts of interests between small and large shareholders with respect to the payout decision of firms. We use this fact to study (i) whether firm behavior reflects preferences of blockholders and (ii) the effectiveness of minority shareholder protection on...

Recent research indicates that the majority of listed firms in Germany (and also in many other countries around the world) have a dominant owner rather than being widely-held. Hence, owner-dominated firms comprise an important subset of listed companies. This article introduces the concept of an...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...