This paper argues that special purpose vehicles, SPVs, are two-edged financial constructs whose bad edge consists in conveying opaque governance, whereas its good one amounts to interesting financial engineering. Firstly, the notion of opaque governance is highlighted, to focus next on SPVs and...

In this paper we challenge the view that corporate bonds are always arm's length debt. We analyze the effect of bond ratings on the stock price return to acquirers in M&A transactions, which tend to have significant effects on creditor wealth. We find acquirers abnormal returns to be higher if...

This paper is aimed at exploring how X-efficiency or management quality is associated with one of the most vivid forms of international banking, that is, entering new markets by setting up foreign subsidiaries. The analysis focuses on the supposition that management quality ought to be one of...

This paper investigates conflicts of interest associated with relationship banking. Using a sample of 270 German initial public offerings (IPOs), we ask if universal-bank-underwritten IPOs perform differently from IPOs underwritten by specialized investment banks. We find that universal-bank...

This study investigates how credit ratings affect firm innovation. By exploiting sovereign downgrades as an exogenous shock to corporate credit ratings, we show that a sovereign downgrade leads to significant reductions in innovation among firms that have a rating at the sovereign bound ex ante....

We investigate the decisions of listed firms to go private once again. We start by revealing that while a significant number of firms which go public is VC-backed, an overproportional share of these VC-backed firms go private later on (they stay on the exchange for an average of 8.5 years). We...

Despite an increasing importance of secondary buyouts in the private equity market, little is known about the perspective of the seller and his motives for choosing this exit type. Do private equity firms have a clear pecking order regarding the exit channels for their portfolio companies? Is a...

Using a hand-collected data set of private firm acquisitions and IPOs, this paper develops the first empirical analysis in the literature of the "IPO valuation premium puzzle," which refers to a situation where many private firms choose to be acquired rather than to go public at higher...

The study extents the literature of the advising bank's positive influence on the performance in mergers and acquisitions by modeling the double endogeneity arising from the banks' selection by their expertise and advisory relationships along acquisition sequences. The double endogeneity arising...

This paper examines local bias in the context of venture capital (VC) investments. Based on a sample of US VC investments between 1980 and June 2009, we find more reputable VCs (older, larger, more experienced, and with stronger IPO track record) and VCs with broader networks exhibit less local...