In the corporate finance tradition, starting with Berle and Means (1932), corporations should generally be run to maximize shareholder value. The agency view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) considers CSR an agency problem and a waste of corporate resources. Given our identification...

We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive. Is this suboptimal investment policy the result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information...

We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive.Is this suboptimal investment policy the result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information...

We simultaneously analyze two mechanisms of the managerial labor market (CEO turnover and remuneration schemes) in two different regulatory regimes, namely before and after the sweeping governance reforms adopted in the UK in the 1990s. We employ sample selection models to examine firms in a...

To address the question as to whether managers manipulate accounting numbers downwards prior to management buyouts (MBOs), we implement an industry-adjusted buyout-specific approach and receive an affirmative answer. In UK buyout companies, negative earnings manipulation (understating the...

This paper reopens the debate on why firms pay lower dividends in the stakeholder-oriented governance regimes of Continental Europe than in the market-oriented Anglo-American world. Previous studies observe the concentrated ownership structures of Continental European firms, and infer that in...

This paper shows that a vibrant and economically important public-to-private market has reemerged in the US, UK and Continental Europe, since the second half of the 1990s. The paper shows recent trends and investigates the motives for public-to-private and LBO transactions. The reasons for the...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s. It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases). In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

The paper examines the payout policy of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s. We complement the existing payout literature studies by analyzing jointly the trends in dividends and share repurchases. Unlike in the US, we find that, in the UK, firms do not demonstrate a...

We study if a CEO's equity-based compensation affects the expected value generation in takeovers. When the objectives of management and shareholders are more aligned, as proxied by the use of equity-based compensation, more value-maximizing acquisitions are expected. Whereas in widely-held firms...