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 explores the relationship between employee rights and dividend policy across countries. Using labor right index as a proxy for agency costs of employees, we test the association between labor rights and dividend policies across countries. The empirical results reveal that labor rights...

This paper explores the relationship between employee rights and dividend policy across countries. Using labor right index as a proxy for agency costs of employees, we test the association between labor rights and dividend policies across countries. The empirical results reveal that labor rights...

In recent years there have been two parallel discussions taking place in the US and in the UK about the role which institutional shareholders should play in governing the corporation. In the US this discussion is around the idea of shareholder empowerment, in the UK it is around shareholder...

The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and...

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...

This paper identifies, and then examines, whether institutional structures can be used to explain the occurrence of accounts manipulation. Specifically, it investigates whether legal origin, level of corruption, the extent of press freedom, State's ownership of enterprises, and the State's...

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 re-examines the theory of legal-origin on the basis of a new longitudinal dataset for four OECD countries (UK, USA, France and Germany) over a long time span 1970-2005. It observes that the civil law countries (France and Germany) provided better minority shareholder protection and...

This paper examines the interaction between propensity to corrupt (PTC) and firm performance. First, I use unique data from Moscow traffic violations to build an individual measure of PTC for every Muscovite with a driver's license (3.1 million people). Next, I determine the PTC for the...