We use event-time methodology to study legal insider trading associated with mergers circa 1900. For mergers with "prospective" disclosures similar to today's, we find substantial value gains at announcement, implying participation by "outside" shareholders despite the absence of insider...

Banks play a central role in financing and monitoring firms in transition economies. We study how bank competition affects the efficiency of the credit allocation, the monitoring of firms, and the firms' restructuring effort. In our model, banks compete to finance an investment project with...

Outside directors of public companies play a central role in overseeing management. Nonetheless, they have rarely incurred personal, out-of-pocket liability for failing to carry out their assigned tasks, either in the litigation-prone United States or other countries. Historically, as threats to...

We investigate ceo turnover in the Italian financial market analyzing a dataset covering the period 1992-2003 for all listed companies. The likelihood of ceo turnover is higher for poorly performing companies, unless the company is controlled by a family. Managers’ entrenchment is observed:...

Using data for publicly traded companies from the UK and two transition countries, the Czech Republic and Poland, we analyze the relationship between ownership concentratio and performance while also accounting for the effect of hostile takeover threats on this relationship. Some argue that...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effects of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the acquiring firms' domestic performance in the U.K. and France. We build a new firm-level data set that combines a global M&A database with balance sheet data for the years 2000 to 2007....

In this paper we wish to analyze the causality relationship between corporate governance and the corporate diversification strategies in the context of the global economic crisis. For the beginning, we have studied several opinions of famous specialists of the area. The analysis that we have...

Although firms may resort to downsizing strategies to improve financial performance, the actual outcome of downsizing is inconclusive. Testing a sample of 1,357 Portuguese firms, we conclude that firms that downsize tend to continue to underperform compared to those that do not downsize.

We investigate the effect of classified boards on the market reaction to seasoned equity offering (SEO) announcements and the operating performance following SEOs. We find that firms with classified boards on average earn lower SEO announcement returns and have worse abnormal operating...

We examine the relationships between the wealth changes associated with a takeover announcement to distinguish between three major competing motives¡Xsynergy, hubris, and agency. Empirical tests indicate that the synergy motive is the predominant explanation for the majority of takeovers in...