I analyse the effect of ownership structure and bank control on performance. I employ a unique data set of 715 German takeovers to test whether group structure, large shareholders, and bank control affect their value to shareholders. First, I find that takeovers increase bidder value, but...

Over the last two decades privatization programs in different countries radically reduced the role of the State as a key player in the economic arena. We use agency theory to discuss the theoretical relationship between changes in the firm's principal-agent structure following privatization, and...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of privatization on the firms' R&D performance. We expect that, in the early period after privatization, path dependencies still negatively affect the efficiency of R&D operations. We test our hypothesis using a Tobin's q measure and estimating a hedonic...

The question of whether the CEO should also serve as chairman of the board is one of the most hotly debated issues in the recent corporate governance discussion. While agencytheoretic arguments advocate a separation of decision and control functions, the empirical evidence focusing on U.S....

The paper argues that the weakest link principle, which has been widely used as a measure of ultimate owners? control rights, has a number of serious problems. A theoretically more satisfactory method of measuring control rights, based on voting power indices, is proposed, and the different...

Bank intermediated finance has been cited frequently as the preferred means for channeling funds from savers to firms. Germany is the prototypical economy where universal banks allegedly exert substantial influence over firms. Despite frequent assertions about the considerable power of German...

We construct and analyze a unique database with 1992-99 information on privatization transactions and labor productivity for the entire surviving population of initially state-owned industrial corporations in Romania. The data permit us to describe the post-privatization ownership structure and...

The recent decline in the Federal Reserve's check volumes has received a lot of attention. Although switching to electronic payments methods and electronic checkprocessing has been credited for much of that decline, some of it could be caused by changes following bank mergers involving Federal...

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Two politicoeconomic equilibria arise from our model, one with little protection of insiders on capital and labor markets, and another one with...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between cross-border acquisitions and innovation activities at the firm level. In contrast to previous studies that analyze the effects on innovation in target firms, this paper investigates the effects on the investing firms. For the...