Using aggregate data from national accounts, we study whether strengthening and harmonizing securities regulation across the European Union increases household equity ownership. We find a significant increase in the proportion of liquid assets invested in equity, both when a household's own...

This study examines the predictive power of comprehensive income and its individual components within the homogenous institutional setting of German IFRS firms. The results could be relevant for the standard setters IASB and FASB and their joint project “Financial Statement Presentation”. We...

Corporate governance literature advances the idea that certain aspects of board of directors' structure improve monitoring of managerial decisions. Among these is the managers' decision to manage earnings. Prior studies have shown that earnings management, in widely-held public companies, is...

This paper studies why multinational firms often share ownership of a foreign affiliate with a local partner even in the absence of government restrictions on ownership. We show that shared ownership may arise, if (i) the partner owns assets that are potentially important for the investment...

This paper uses a large cross-country survey of business firms to assess their influence on government policies. It is found that influence is associated with larger, government-owned firms that have a high degree of ownership concentration. In contrast, foreign ownership matters little. It is...