Over the past few decades, the rapid growth of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) has received interest from academics and practitioners. While M&As continue to be the subject of thorough investigation from a corporate governance standpoint, comparatively less effort has been made to organize and...

When a company establishes subsidiaries with capital provided by a third party, the subsidiaries' shareholders include the parent company (controlling shareholders) and minority (noncontrolling) shareholders. When shareholders' interests are divergent, conflicts may arise, causing inefficiencies...

We study the role of pyramidal ownership structures in the creation of new firms. Our results suggest that pyramids arise because they provide a financing advantage in setting up new firms when the pledgeability of cash flows to outside financiers is limited. Parent companies supply inside funds...

This paper examines how deviation from firms' target leverage influences their decisions on undertaking foreign acquisitions. Using a sample of 5,746 completed bids by UK acquirers from 1987 to 2012, we observe that over-deviated firms are more likely to acquire foreign targets. Consistent with...

We investigate the principal-principal (PP) conflicts between large blockholders in the context of cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). We focus on the conflicts between family blockholders and two groups of financial institutional investors – banks and mutual funds. We hypothesize that different...

We test the hypothesis that foreign direct investment promotes corporate governance spillovers in the host country. Using firm-level data from 64 countries during the period 2005-2014, we find that cross-border M&A activity is associated with subsequent improvements in the governance of...

We test the hypothesis that foreign direct investment promotes corporate governance spillovers in the host country. Using firm-level data from 64 countries during the period 2005-2014, we find that cross-border M&A activity is associated with subsequent improvements in the governance of...

We investigate how investor protection (IP) affects target selection when a firm decides to enter a foreign market through an acquisition. A law and finance model shows the acquirer prefers better-performing firms when the target country has weaker IP than its home country. This cherry picking...

We study the role of institutional investors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that foreign institutional ownership is positively associated with the intensity of cross-border M&A activity worldwide. Foreign institutional ownership increases the probability that a merger...

Acquisitions by emerging market firms of targets located in developed markets have increased drastically over the recent years. We use this setting to test Coffee's (1999) bonding hypothesis in a cross-border M&A context by examining whether acquirers adopt the corporate governance practices...