Debt may help to manage type II corporate agency conflicts because it is easier for controlling shareholders to modify the leverage ratio than to modify their share of capital. A sample of 112 firms listed on the French stock market over the period 1998-2009 is empirically tested. It supports an...

We examine whether passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 did in fact have the intended effect of reducing agency conflicts or did it alter managerial incentives in ways that could be detrimental to firm value. Our findings for the full sample suggest a decrease in firm value and the...

We assess the diverse roles of institutional investors in impacting survival and performance of chronically underperforming firms and contrast the results for consistently overperforming firms. We find material differences in institutional investor roles between these two samples....

In this paper we describe a theoretical model of optimal investment of various types of financially constrained firms. We show that the resulting relationship between internal funds and investment is non-monotonic. In particular, the magnitude of the cash flow sensitivity of the investment is...

This paper analyzes the impact of blockownership dispersion on firm value. Blockholdings by multiple blockholders is a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. market. It is not clear, however, whether dispersion among blockholder is preferable to having a more concentrated ownership structure. To test...

Multiple blockholder structures are a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. The theoretical literature, however, provides conflicting predictions on whether a single large blockholder or a set of dispersed smaller blockholders is better for firm value. Using U.S. data, we find a negative...

The purpose of this paper is to show that different methodologies may lead to different implications about the validity of the pecking order theory. Using data from Greek firms as a starting-point, the paper first investigates whether they follow the financing pattern implied by the pecking...

Recent research has documented that family-controlled firms are very common around the world. This paper provides new evidence on the accounting and market performance of this type of companies. The empirical investigation is conducted on a market in which family firms are well-established and...

When estimating Loss Given Default (LGD) parameters using a workout approach, i.e. discounting cash flows over the workout period, the problem arises of how to take into account partial recoveries from incomplete work-outs. The simplest approach would see LGD based on complete recovery profiles...