In recent years considerable attention has been devoted to differences across countries in the institutional environments in which corporations operate, and the consequences of these institutional differences for corporate performance. In this paper we test for the presence of differences in...

This article makes two important contributions to the literature on the incentive effects of insider ownership. First, it presents a clean method for separating the positive wealth effect of insider ownership from the negative entrenchment effect, which can be applied to samples of companies...

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves, and that these waves are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We test four hypotheses that have been advanced to explain merger waves: the industry shocks, q-, overvaluation and managerial...

We use investment-cash flow regressions to show that both asymmetric-information and agency problems are more severe in Continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon countries leading to too little investment by firms with attractive investment opportunities and too much by those with poor...

This paper analyzes the effects of mergers around the world over the past 15 years. We utilize a large panel of data on mergers to test several hypotheses about mergers. The effects of the mergers are examined by comparing the performance of the merging firms with control groups of nonmerging...

We analyze the impact of corporate governance institutions, ownership structures andexternal capital market constraints on company returns on investment by using a sampleof more than 19,000 companies from 61 countries across the world. We show that (1) ofthese three sets of institutions, the...

This paper takes a look at the effects of mergers in continental Europe over the past 15 years. We use a large panel of data on mergers to test several hypotheses. The effects of the mergers are examined by comparing the performance of the merging firms with control groups of non-merging and/or...

We shed light on three conundrums in the literature on investment: why investments out of different sources of finance earn different returns, why different studies report different patterns of returns across sources of finance, and why companies in developing countries make greater use of...