We study the government's decision to sell a state-owned enterprise to strategic investors in a common value auction setting. The government can choose to sell his control stake all at once, or to design a sequential auction of shares. The sequential auction allows information transmission, so...

This essay discusses the corporate governance of banks. Bank managers must balance competing demands from shareholders and regulators, which distinguishes banks from most other firms. The essay is structured into three parts. The theoretical section first broadly defines management and its...

There are two main sources of confusion in the public corporate governance debate. One is the confusion about the role of public policy intervention. The other is a lack of empirical knowledge about the corporate landscape where rules are supposed to be implemented and the functioning of...

While there is widespread concern that target CEO retention by a private equity acquirer can result in a lower premium for target shareholders because of the potential conflict of interest of the CEO, it is also possible that target shareholders could benefit from CEO retention because it can...

This paper estimates the effect of increasing shareholder "voice" in corporations through a new governance rule that provides shareholders with a regular vote on pay: Say on Pay. We apply a regression discontinuity design to Say on Pay shareholder proposals to deal with prior expectations and...

In family firms, the succession of controlling equity stake to next generation is an issue of paramount importance. This, however, can be a major challenge in the presence of heavy inheritance or gift tax burden (high tax rate and absence of tax-saving vehicles, such as trusts or foundations)...

This study investigates the transition from being a listed company with a dispersed ownership structure to being a privately held company with a concentrated ownership structure. We consider a sample of private equity backed portfolio companies to evaluate the consequences of the corporate...

We investigate the relation between corporate governance characteristics of hostile takeover targets and the choice to employ 'harmful' resistance that is not perceived as being motivated by shareholders' interests. We find that harmful resistance is associated with firms where managers have...

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

This article finds that non-controlling minority shareholdings among competitors lower the sustainability of collusion. This is the case under an even greater variety of situations than was indicated by earlier literature. The collusion destabilizing effect of minority shareholdings is mainly...