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)...

The emergence of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) and some spectacular investments ofthese funds in recent years have caused widespread attention on international financialmarkets. Most SWFs are domiciled in Arabian countries, East Asia and Russia. Their lowtransparency led to concerns that SWFs...

The question of whether the CEO should also serve as chairman of the board is one of themost hotly debated issues in the recent corporate governance discussion. While agencytheoreticarguments advocate a separation of decision and control functions, the empiricalevidence focusing on U.S....

We examine the coexistence of banks and financial markets, studyinga credit market where the qualities of investment projects are notobservable and the investment decisions of entrepreneurs are not contractible...

In this paper, I tackle the question whether "one share - one vote" should become a European law rule. I examine, first of all the economic theory concerning one share - one vote and its optimality, and the law and economics literature on dual class recapitalizations and other deviations from...

This paper studies the impact of cash constraints on equilibrium research intensities in a patent race between a current owner of the “state of the art” technology (the incumbent) and entrants. We develop a simple model, where players need to raise funds from imperfectly informed creditors to...

Taxes play an important role in determining the capital structure of companies. Consequently,a multinational company would choose its capital structure according to differencesin international taxation. Unlike purely national firms, multinationals can also use intercompanyloans to shift profits...

This paper develops a model of corporate investment and financing decisions thatdiffers from previous contributions by recognizing that firms face uncertainty regardingtheir future access to credit markets and may have to search for creditors when raisingdebt financing. We show that accounting...

Even 50 years after Modigliani/Miller’s irrelevance theorem, the basic question of how firmschoose their capital structure remains unclear. This survey paper aims at summarizing anddiscussing corresponding recent developments in empirical capital structure research, which,in our view, are...