This paper provides an overview of the possible linkages between state-owned banks, privatization, and banking sector crises. Data on privatizations in over 65 countries is used together with data from the banking crisis literature to consider the relationship between state-owned banks and...

This paper studies the capital allocation decisions of firms that are comparable except for ownership under a unique setting using investment level data. We find allocative inefficiency across ownership to be exacerbated under policy distortions through subsidized credits targeted at state-owned...

We investigate the determinants of firms' implicit insurance to employees, using a difference-indifference approach: we rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and exploit variation in unemployment insurance across and within countries to...

If unemployment insurance is more generous, workers should demand less implicit insurance from their employers: firm- and government-provided insurance should be substitutes. Using a firm-level international panel dataset, we investigate this hypothesis exploiting cross-country and time-series...

We look at the ESG practices of the US’s top 100 private equity firms, representing more than $1.5 trillion of committed capital and directly employs 12 million individuals in the United States. We find that the ESG practices, and their corresponding disclosures, significantly lag behind that...

This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on firm-level investment during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that firms with less conservative financial reporting experienced a sharper decline in investment activity following...

A recent reform in China, the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program, made a subset of Chinese stocks investable for foreign investors, thus partially opening China's stock market. We use this reform to examine the quantity and quality effects of stock market liberalization on corporate...

In this paper we present and test a theory of how political corruption, found in many transition and emerging market economies, affects corporate governance and productive efficiency of firms. Our model predicts that underdeveloped democratic institutions that do not punish political corruption...

State-owned and other state-invested enterprises (SIEs) have become more prominent in the global economy over the last decade. A growing role for state-invested enterprises in the marketplace is not in itself onerous. According to an OECD consensus, as expressed through the Organisation’s...

This paper analyzes deals involving private and State-owned enterprises (SOEs) worldwide since 2004. We consider four types of deals: privatizations, publicizations, private reorganizations (i.e private firms acquiring a private target) and public reorganizations. (i.e. both acquirers and...