The ongoing controversy over Melrose’s purchase of engineering company GKN illustrates many common misunderstandings about how free markets can work to the benefit of all. Shareholders, not politicians, should decide how to run their businesses, including whether a new management team could do...

This article examines how heterogeneous features among business groups influence the corporate diversification – firm performance relationship. The study classifies heterogeneity along three dimensions: group size, group diversity, and share ownership. Using a sample of firms from India, the...

Using a large panel of Chinese listed companies over the period 2004-2010, we document that both export propensity and intensity increase with managerial ownership up to a point of around 23%-27%, and decrease thereafter. In addition, we find a negative association between state ownership and...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in assessing the effectiveness of corporate governance in China. This paper examines the impact of internal governance mechanisms such as ownership structure and board characteristics and debt financing on agency costs making use of a large...

When public institutions do not support information disclosure and contract enforcement, controlling owners may compensate by setting up ownership networks that facilitate the exchange of resources and alignment of interests. We examine how firms' controlling owners draw power from ownership...

Agency problems may arise from the separation of ownership and management (Type I) or from conflicts of interest between controlling and non-controlling shareholders (Type II). In this study, we investigate whether the relation between corporate governance and firm performance depends on the...

We investigate how ownership structure influences operating performance and implied agency costs using multi-year data on over 42,000 firms, covering the full spectrum of ownership and management arrangements ranging from owner or non-owner managed single or multiple-owner private firms, through...

This article provides new evidence on the important role of institutional investors in affecting corporate strategy. Institutional cross-ownership between two firms not only increases the probability of them merging, but also affects the outcomes of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Institutional...