The manner in which hostile takeovers have historically been executed has just begun to receive serious academic attention. Similarly, while the literature on the accuracy and determinants of share prices is voluminous, there has been little systematic historical analysis of when and how modern...

A sweeping and protracted reform of corporate law took place in Finland in the 1970s. The reform brought significant improvements to investor protection and, similar to the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, tightened disclosure rules at the cost of increasing the work load in corporate reporting. We find...

This paper is the first long-run historical analysis of stock market development and minority shareholder protection in France (1852-2007). For this purpose, we constructed a unique time series of shareholder protection indices (anti-director rights and securities law) and relied on triangulated...

This paper is the first one that uses a panel data of different types of shareholder protection in order to examine (i) the effect of such laws on stock market development and (ii) the convergence of shareholder protection laws through cross-border mergers and acquisitions. We find significant...

Governance has many dimensions – corporate governance pertains to the firm's management whilst sovereign governance pertains to the firm's exposure to sovereign risk, corruption, and poor regulation. We show that both are important drivers of firm value and this has serious implications for...

Governance has many dimensions - corporate governance pertains to the firm's management whilst sovereign governance pertains to the firm's exposure to sovereign risk, corruption, and poor regulation. We show that both are important drivers of firm value and this has serious implications for the...

This paper studies the returns of non public firms acquisitions. Like the American studies do, we show the existence of a “non public firms acquisition effect” for the European multi-acquirer firms: abnormal returns are much higher for non-public firms (subsidiaries or private held firms)...

Using a sample of UK mergers and acquisitions from 1985-2004, we show that equity over-valuation appears to play an important role in the determination of financing method. Our results are broadly consistent with the Sheifer and Vishny (2003) theory of market-driven acquisitions rather than a...

We use recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 28 developed and emerging economies to test whether the strengthening of shareholder rights in the course of the mid-1990s and 2000s promoted stock market development in those countries. We find only weak and...