The current financial crisis has given rise to calls to toughen considerably the codes of corporate governance put in place in many countries to regulate corporate behaviour (e.g. the UK Combined Code). These codes vary slightly in form but tend to contain a mix of non-discretionary regulations...

We study rights offerings using a sample of 8,238 rights offers announced during 1995-2008 in 69 countries. Although shareholders prefer having the option to trade rights, issuers deliberately restrict tradability in 38% of the offerings. We argue that firms restrict rights trading to avoid the...

Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information...

In a large sample of shareholder initiated class action lawsuits from 1996 to 2011, we find a significant increase in informed insider option exercises during the class action period compared to the preceding quarter, and we find that this change is positively related to the probability of...

We study how deregulation of corporate law affects the decision of entrepreneurs of where to incorporate.  Recent rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have enabled entrepreneurs to select their country of incorporation independently of their real seat.  We analyze foreign...

Privatisation is the major component in all the transition processes carried out in the Central and East European countries. With different pace and scale across the counties, it took distinct, sometimes even opposing forms. Nevertheless, almost all these countries have developed processes of...

Privatisation is the major component in all the transition processes carried out in the Central and East European countries. With different pace and scale across the counties, it took distinct, sometimes even opposing forms. The volume presents the results from a comparative research on mass...

Shareholder valuations are economically and statistically positively correlated with more powerful independent directors, their power gauged by social network power centrality measures. Sudden deaths of powerful independent directors significantly reduce shareholder value, consistent with...

We examine whether Delaware serves as a domestic tax haven. We find that taxes play an important role in determining whether U.S. firms locate subsidiaries in Delaware and that these tax factors are economically important when compared to the legal and governance factors considered in prior...