The role of government shareholding in corporate performance is central to an understanding of China?s newly privatized large firms. In this paper, we analyze shareholders as agents that can both harm and benefit companies. We examine the ownership structure of 826 listed corporations and find...

This report provides an overview of the causes and consequences of the Italian State-owned Enterprises (SOE) reform process. Particularly, it analyzes the symbiotic link between share issue privatization (SIP), i.e. privatization in public equity markets, and financial market development, and...

Using data on 451 Chinese privatizations over the period 1994-2002, this paper empirically investigates the firm and stock market characteristics that detfirmine the size of the portion of new shares sold to the general public and underpricing at SIP-time. We find that poor perfirmance and...

"We document the market response to an unexpected announcement of proposed sales of government-owned shares in China. In contrast to the "privatization premium" found in earlier work, we find a negative effect of government ownership on returns at the announcement date and a symmetric positive...