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...

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...

We analyse whether family firms differ from non-family firms in terms of business segment and geographical diversification or the application of currency hedging instruments. This analysis is based on a unique dataset of 339 publicly listed companies (1,561 firm years) in the German Prime...

Financial constraints are frictions that prevent firms from funding all desired investments, which might affect firm value and aggregate economic activity. We investigate whether and how bank governance, especially private vs. non-private bank ownership, affects financial constraints of small...

We find that U.S. corporations' demand for liquidity is sensitive to two importantfactors: uncertainty facing the rm and the quality of corporate governance. Fol-lowing prior research, we find that both factors have important influences on firms'cash holdings. Our results also indicate that the...

Purpose: We examine motives for hiring a non-family Chief FinancialOfficer (CFO) in family firms. We explore the perceptions of family firm ownerstowards external managers by analyzing how their goals relate to the employmentof a non-family CFO.Design/methodology/approach: Our study is based on...

Around the world (with the U.S. and U.K. as exceptions) concentrated ownershipstructures and controlling shareholders are predominant even among listed firms. We providenovel empirical evidence how such controlling shareholders, in particular founding families,affect payout policy decisions....

This study examines how family firm characteristics affect capital structure decisions. In our analysis we disentangle the influence of three distinct components of a family firm: ownership, supervisory and management board activities by the founding family. Thereby, we use a unique panel...