This paper uses German evidence to address two questions about corporate governance. Theeffects of ownership on corporate governance have received much recent attention, but verylittle of this has been devoted to the appropriate way to measure firm ownership. The resultsof this paper show that...

Einleitung: In der zweiten Hälfte der neunziger Jahre ist die Verbesserung der CorporateGovernance börsennotierter Gesellschaften zu einem intensiv diskutiertenThema geworden. Im Unterschied zu früheren Debatten, wie sie vor etwazwanzig Jahren anlässlich der Arbeit von Jensen/Meckling (1976)...

This paper uses firm-level data on 162 large Hungarian enterprises to analyse the relationship betweenownership structure and corporate performance in 1998 and 1999. Cross-sectional regressions are runfor each of these years using the return on assets (ROA) as the measure of performance. Both...

Building on the ‘law and economics’ literature, this paper analyses corporategovernance implications of debt financing in an environment where a dominant owner isable to extract ex ante ‘private benefits of control’. Ownership concentration may result inlower efficiency, measured as a...

In this study we empirically investigate the effect of financial distress on cor-porate ownership and control. Our analysis is based on a panel of 267 Germanfirms that suffered from repeated interest coverage shortfalls and steep share pricedeclines between 1996 and 2004. We track each firm's...

It is the objective of this paper to determine the voting premium for French shares by comparing the values of voting and non-voting shares, and to analyze the value of the voting rights. The study uses data for 25 French companies which had both types of shares outstanding and traded on the...

Our study provides evidence on the share price reactions to the announcement of equity issues inGermany, where capital market is characterized by institutional features distinct from the U.S. market.German seasoned equity issues yield a positive market reaction which contrasts to the significant...

Investors and academics increasingly criticize that features of employee stock option (ESO) programs reflect rent-extraction by managers (managerial power view). The authors use a unique European dataset to investigate the relationship between the design of ESO programs and corporate governance...

While in the US stock-based incentives are commonly used since the 50s of the last century, in Germany they were invented only some ten years ago. Even in 1996 firms faced considerable regulatory difficulties when willing to grant such incentives. In the meantime the legal environment has...

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...