The paper argues that transparency of large corporate farms operating in transition economies is the factor that affects their competitive position as it helps to preserve access to international equity markets and to reduce uncertainty that arises from imperfect local input markets. We...

Concentrated ownership of large listed companies is widespread throughout the world, and Germany is typical in this respect. This paper proposes a method of distinguishing empirically between the beneficial and harmful effects of ownership concentration, and applies it to German data. The...

Previous research on firm performance does not adequately account for the interrelatedness of a firm's professional connections, political ties, and family business-group affiliation. Many widely-cited findings may therefore be subject to confounding bias. To address this problem, we adopt a...

This paper studies the turnover of board of directors members in a sample of 72 companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange during the period 1988-1996. We investigate whether board members change more frequently when company performance is poor, as the literature suggests, and whether and how...

The paper investigates how Private Equity (PE) ownership influences out-performance of a high-growth firm, and whether it differs from the effect of two other important types of financial investors: banks and non-bank financial firms. We transform the levered return on equity into a unlevered...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the German corporate governance rating recently developed by Drobetz, Schillhofer, and Zimmermann (2004). We find a non- linear relationship between ownership concentration and the quality of firmlevel corporate governance as measured by the rating. Firms...