Recent evidences indicate that privatization leads to enormous benefits to society almost without undesirable costs. However, stakeholders of privatization seem not to satisfy the resulting performance of privatized firms. Using data from 202 firms privatized from 37 countries during the period...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China’s share-issue privatized firms from 2000 to 2012. We find that the level of cash holdings increases as state ownership declines. For the average firm in our sample, a 10 percentage-point decline in state ownership leads...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 2000 to 2012. We find that the level of cash holdings increases as state ownership declines. For the average firm in our sample, a 10 percentage-point decline in state ownership leads to...

We review and bridge the literature on the internationalization of state-owned firms and sovereign wealth funds to provide a novel understanding of how governments’ nonbusiness objectives affect foreign investments. We explain how governments as foreign investors behave differently from...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 1993 to 2007. We find that the level of cash holdings declines as state ownership increases. This negative relation is attributable to the soft-budget constraint (SBC) inherent in state...

Section 1 presents tests for the hypothesis that shifts in technology and industry composition might have played a key role in causing the U.S. listing gap. We replicate our core analysis at the industry level and find no evidence that the dynamics of the number of listing is driven by industry...

The abnormal decline in the number of US public firms is often blamed on merger activity, private equity investments, and stock market regulations. We compare and quantify the effects of these channels on the evolution of the US listing gap in a unified framework. In the US, an extra 100 mergers...

This paper examines the financial and operating performance of 31 national telecommunication companies in 25 countries that were fully or partially privatised through public share offering between October 1981 and November 1998. Using conventional pre- versus post-privatisation comparisons, we...

We examine 802 investments by 33 Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in publicly traded companies between May 1985 and November 2009, and find that SWFs tend to invest in large, levered, profitable growth firms, usually headquartered in an OECD country. Announcements of SWF investments yield...

This study describes the newly created Monitor-FEEM Sovereign Wealth Fund Database and discusses the investment patterns and performance of 1,216 individual investments, worth over $357 billion, made by 35 sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) between January 1986 and September 2008. Approximately half...