Family firms are an important phenomenon of the German capital market. We analyse the broadest market segment of the German Stock Exchange, the CDAX, for the years 1998 to 2008. According to a founding-family definition almost half of all CDAX-listed non-financial firms in Germany can be...

Liberal and critical theorists alike claim that the world political economy is becoming globalized. If they are right, leading corporations should gradually be losing their national characters and converging in their fundamental strategies and operations. Multinational corporations (MNCs) should...

The paper shows that, as owners accumulate larger stakes and hence become less risk-tolerant, their incentives to monitor management are attenuated because monitoring shifts some of the firm's risk from management to owners. This counterbalances the positive effect which more concentrated...

The German Corporate Governance Code works according to the comply-or-explain principle. One of its recommendations was to publish the remuneration of the members of the executive board on an individual basis. We examine the characteristics of the firms that comply with the code requirement. Our...

This paper provides causal evidence on the effect of ownership structure on firm value and on the impact of large tax incentives on the divestiture decision of equity blockholders by exploiting a quasi-experimental policy change in Germany. The 2000 Tax Reduction Act repealed corporate...

Aim: A global rise in inflation has sparked a renewed interest in the matter of cash holding decisions in firms. Increasing inflation makes for different cash holding practices, but the effect of cash holdings on firm performance remains unclear. This study aims to determine what the effect of...

In this study, we examine how corporate governance affects portfolio management. Investors are expected to opt for a judicious trade-off between risk and return. Such an objective can be achieved through the contribution of corporate governance which is assumed to align manager and shareholders...

We analyze the relationship between board-level codetermination and shareholder value. We use a unique dataset of listed German companies that enables us to identify heterogeneous aspects of codetermination and overcome otherwise common identification issues. We find that codetermination reduces...

This paper examines the economic determinants that lead German firms to adopt value-based management and control systems (VBMSs). Further, we investigate whether firms' operating performance improves after VBMS adoption. Using a hand-collected data set of German listed firms covering 1,575...