Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about...

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

This paper provides an overview of the antecedents, main drivers and spillover mechanisms of the turbulence emanating from the US sub-prime credit market in the summer of 2007. Its primary goal is to discuss the facts and interrelationships featured in the various analyses and statistics in a...

Management scholars have sought to answer the question: is there a financial payoff for ad-dressing ecological and social issues? We move beyond this question and include a time com-ponent for corporate financial performance (CFP) and a firm’s innovativeness in order to ask: when does it pay?...

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to managerial power or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S. public...

We address one of the cardinal puzzles of European corporate law: the lack of derivate share-holder suits. We explain this phenomenon on the basis of percentage limits which require share-holders to hold a minimum amount of shares in order to bring a lawsuit. We show that, under this legal...

Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is motivated by increasing shareholder value through improved corporate governance. Therefore, stronger corporate governance can reduce the returns from M&A activity, including M&A foreign direct investment (FDI). This, in turn, can reduce the returns from...

We use new data from SEC filings to investigate how S&P 500 firms execute their open market repurchase programs. We find that smaller S&P 500 firms repurchase less frequently than larger firms, and at a price which is significantly lower than the average market price. Their repurchase activity...