Private equity buyouts have become a common element in the industrial development process. I survey the literature on the real economic effect of buyouts: employment, wages, productivity, and long-run investments. Employment tend to marginally fall after a buyout in most countries studied, with...

Should boards of financial firms be blamed for the financial crisis? Using a large sample of data on nonfinancial and financial firms for the period 1996-2007, I document that the governance of financial firms is, on average, not obviously worse than in nonfinancial firms. In fact, using simple...

This paper examines whether global insurance mergers and acquisitions (M&As) create value for shareholders by conducting an event study of M&A transactions for the period 1990-2006. Insurance acquirers realized small positive cumulative average abnormal returns (CAARs), whereas targets realized...

This paper examines the importance of institutional quality in cross-border buyout performance. Using 2,639 cross-border buyout investments during 1998-2007 in 38 countries, we find that the higher the institutional quality of the country where the portfolio company is located, the higher the...

In this paper we discuss the continued transition of financial markets towards trade standardization and the clearing of transactions, outlining the role of central clearing counterparties CCPs in reducing systemic and idiosyncratic risk. We contrast this with a discussion on bespoke non-cleared...

Policy uncertainty has been documented to have a significant impact on corporate investment decisions. This paper investigates the effect of policy uncertainty on cross-border acquisitions. We find a significant monotonic relationship between the size of the acquired equity stake in a target...

The attention for the governance of financial sector supervisors is of a recent date. The debate has risen to the fore as part of the wider discussion about the appropriate institutional organization of financial supervision and the drive for compliance with international best practices in the...

This paper looks at the post-financial-crisis period, and the relationship between default risk and corporate governance for financial firms outside North America. Default risk is measured by both credit default swap spreads (CDS) and the Merton-type default probabilities from Bloomberg. Our...

This paper describes how behavioral elements are relevant to financial supervision,regulation, and central banking. It focuses on (1) behavioral effects of norms (social, legal,and market); (2) behavior of others (internalization, identification, and compliance); and(3) psychological biases. It...