The paper develops a theory of ownership structure based on the notion that corporate control and secondary market liquidity are not perfectly compatible with each other. We analyse the tradeoff between these two objectives for two different ownership structures: the privately held firm, which...

This paper studies optimal financial contracts and product market competition under a strategic transparency decision. When firms seeking outside finance resort to actively monitored debt in order to commit against opportunistic behaviour, the dominant lender can influence corporate...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

The rapidly growing literature studying the relationship between legal origin, investor protection, and finance has stimulated an important debate in academic circles. It has also generated a number of applied research projects and strong policy statements. This paper discusses the implications,...

Dominant investors can influence the publicly available information about firms by affecting the cost of information collection. Under strategic competition, transparency results in higher variability of profits and output. Thus lenders prefer less transparency, since this protects firms when in...