This study documents how group trademarks, comprising the business group's name and logo, can be used for the benefit of controlling families at the expense of outside minority shareholders. Using a sample of business groups in Korea, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis. First,...

This study investigates whether business groups can harm the capital allocation efficiency of non-business group firms. From a sample of Korean firms (1987 to 2010), we compute an annual index of the collective strength and dominance of large business groups (LBG) per industry. We find that this...

Disparity between control and ownership rights gives rise to the risk of tunneling by the controlling shareholder, and is prevalent in many emerging market economies and present in some developed countries. At the same time, international investors come from different countries whose home...

We study an agency problem in private universities — the conflict between controlling families and other stakeholders. We investigate whether universities over which controlling families have disproportionately significant power relative to the amount of funds they contribute, that is,...

Prior work in emerging markets provides evidence that better corporate governance predicts higher market value, but very little evidence on the specific channels through which governance can increase value. We provide evidence, from a natural experiment in Korea, that reduced tunneling is an...

According to the prior literature, family executives of family-controlled firms receive lower compensation than non-family executives. One of the key driving forces behind this is the existence of family members who are not involved in management, but own significant fraction of shares and...

Outside directors and audit committees are widely considered to be central elements of good corporate governance. We use a 1999 Korean law as an exogenous shock to assess how board structure affects firm market value. The law mandates 50% outside directors and an audit committee for large public...

This paper investigates whether foreign institutional investors in emerging markets can enhance shareholder value. We pay special attention to two dimensions of investor heterogeneity: whether an investor declares itself as an activist, and whether an investor comes from a country with a strong...

With the removal of statute-based anti-takeover provisions during the aftermath of Asian crisis, a significant number of Korean firms started to introduce charter-based measures. In this paper, we make use of this unique situation where firm-level anti-takeover provisions (ATP) vary over time...

We discuss empirical challenges in multicountry studies of the effect of firm-level corporate governance on firm value, focusing on emerging markets. We assess the severe data, “construct validity,” and endogeneity issues in these studies, propose methods to respond to those issues, and...