Drawing on insights from social science methodology and systems analysis, the article adopts a holistic view of the equity markets and highlights how market forces have been driving the evolution in the equity markets towards a first-best corporate governance model. This governance model is the...

Over the period 1980-2007 multinational firms' investment grew four times faster than worldwide GDP. Yet the evidence on whether global diversification is valuable is inconclusive. This paper uses detailed FDI data for 251 UK multinational firms and 4,676 subsidiaries to show that multinational...

There are two main regulatory approaches in relation to private sale-of-control transactions. The ‘market rule' confers maximum freedom on a company's incumbent controller by enabling sale shares (hence control over the company) to any acquirer offering an acceptable price. This concept...

This paper presents evidence that subsidiaries of multinational firms have higher valuations than locally matched firms. Using a unique sample of 251 UK multinational firms and 4,676 subsidiaries, the paper finds that multinational firms achieve, on average, an international diversification...

This study examines a public policy issue: whether government officials engage in earnings management to collude with private investors in the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We find that the managers of listed Chinese SOEs, who are de facto bureaucrats, employ income-decreasing...

Using 2,956 CEO turnovers from 1993 to 2009, I find that default probability is useful in understanding and predicting forced CEO turnovers for non-distressed firms, controlling for conventional performance measures, such as stock performance. The high predictive power is not explained by...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced — or has failed to influence — federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH...

Independence (in fact as well as in appearance) is widely thought to be necessary for the quality of audits, and audit quality is often equated with independence. Private incentives to demand (and supply) independent certification of financial statements are thought to be insufficient, thus the...