This paper examines the financial and operating performance of 31 national telecommunication companies in 25 countries that were fully or partially privatized through public share offering. Using conventional pre- versus post-privatization comparisons and panel data estimation techniques, we...

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...

Seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) executed through accelerated underwritings have increased global market share recently, raising over $850 billion since 1998, and now account for over half (two-thirds) of the value of U.S. (European) SEOs. We examine 31,242 global SEOs, executed during...

How does increased noise trading affect market liquidity and trading costs? We use "The Wall Street Journal"'s "Investment Dartboard" column, which stimulates noise trading, as a natural experiment to evaluate models of the bid-ask spread. We find that substantial increases in trading volume and...

Discrimination is notoriously difficult to document. Convincing tests for discrimination require good measures of the legitimate determinants of the outcome of interest, for example wages and productivity. While few contexts provide data adequate to the task of measuring discrimination, copious...

Seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) executed through accelerated underwritings have recently seen significant increases in global market share, and now account for a majority of the proceeds from both U.S. and European SEOs. Based on their study of over 30,000 global SEOs during the period...

Privatization has certainly been one of the main events of the economic and financial history of the 20th century. Between 1997 and 2004 more than 4,000 privatization operations were carried out in the world, bringing to governments revenues for over 1,350US$billion. Western Europe emerges as...

This paper reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of public ownership and control. We argue that the transfer of operational control over productive assets to the private sector represents the most desirable governance, due to the inherent difficulty for citizens to constrain...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of political institutions in privatization. The empirical testing relies on a new political database with continuous and time-varying measures of the political-institutional setting, and of the partisan orientation of the executive. Using...