This study compares the pre- and postprivatization financial and operating performance of 85 companies from 28 industrialized countries that were privatized through public share offerings for the period from 1990 through 1996. We document significant increases in profitability, output, operating...

Our study extends on conventional measures of contagion by directly investigating changes in the existence and the directions of causality. In particular, we apply a Granger-causality methodology on sovereign bond spreads as a measure of perceived country risk. For the Asian crisis, we find...

Since 1994 the Italian government has sold equity stakes in some 75 large state enterprises, in the process raising over $125 billion-more than any other country during the same period. In this article, a U.S. academic collaborates with the Italian government's Director of Privatization in...

We examine the impact of political, institutional, and economic factors on the choice between selling a state-owned enterprise in the public capital market through a share issue privatization (SIP) and selling it in the private capital market in an asset sale. SIPs are more likely in less...

Alfred Chandler once described the U.S. conglomerate movement of the 1960s and '70s as an "historical aberration and a 'disaster." And the recent trend in corporate mergers and acquisitions away from "diversifying" acquisitions would seem to confirm Chandler's argument. 1998 Morgan Stanley.

We explore whether government ownership affects the cost of debt using a sample of fully and partially privatized companies. On average across firms, a one-percentage-point decrease in government ownership is associated with an increase in the credit spread, used as a proxy for the cost of debt,...