Objective – Although corporate tax avoidance is a widely discussed topic in the literature, conflicts do emerge when it is analyzed through the context of primary corporate duty. Should companies, in managing their taxes, solely honor their obligation to increase shareholders' wealth or should...

The corporate governance literature has shown that self-interested controlling owners tend to divert corporate resources for private benefits at the expense of other shareholders. Such behavior leads the controlling owners to prefer long maturity debt to short maturity debt, to avoid frequent...

A fast-growing legal literature commenting on a set of empirical papers alleging anticompetitive effects of common ownership claims that the reported effects, if true, would imply that corporate executives violate their fiduciary duty: whereas acting in the interest of common owners can help...

We examine whether institutions' monitoring effectiveness is related to the number of their blockholdings. We find that the number of blocks that a firm's large institutions hold is positively associated with forced chief executive officer (CEO) turnover-performance sensitivity, abnormal returns...

We examine the relation between passive ownership and financial reporting quality measured by Beneish's (1999) earnings' manipulation score (M-score). We find that passive ownership is negatively related to M-score and to the likelihood of being designated as a “manipulator” firm. However,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of ownership characteristics in a firm's choice of alternative seasoned equity offering (SEO) methods, offer price discounts, and market reactions to such announcements within the UK setting.Design/methodology/approach – The study...

The subprime crisis led to a wave of government interventions in the private sector that has been particularly strong in Europe and Latin America, where several governments are large shareholders in a variety of public firms. In a sense, the subprime crisis induced these governments to behave as...

When innovation is cumulative, patent protection on early inventions can generate holdup problems if later complementary patents are owned by different firms. Consistent with the property rights literature, we show that shareholder ownership overlap across firms with patent complementarities...

This paper examines the valuation effects associated with the incentive structures of different types of institutional investors using the ownership levels of public and private pension funds in a firm. The results suggest that institutional monitoring is associated with valuation effects when...

Public firms are becoming increasingly interconnected through institutional investors' stock ownership, specifically through cross-ownership, in which an institutional investor has a significant stake in multiple firms in the same industry. When a firm seeks external financing for its investment...