Corporate governance is a recent concept that encompasses the costs caused by managerial misbehavior. Corporate governance is concerned with how organizations in general, and corporations in particular, produce value and how that value is distributed among the members of the corporation, its...

We report on the current state and important older findings of empirical studies on corporate credit ratings and their relationship to ratings of other entities. Specifically, we consider the results of three lines of research: The correlation of credit ratings and corporate default, the...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...

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...

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings (IPOs) in China. Using a manually assembled data set, we show that pre-listing RM firms are larger, more profitable, and less politically connected than pre-listing IPO firms. Chinese RM firms also have...

Horizontal shareholding exists when significant shareholders have stock in horizontal competitors. (It is often imprecisely called "common shareholding," but that term can also apply when shareholders own stock in two noncompeting corporations. It differs from "cross-shareholding," which...

This Article shows that new economic proofs and empirical evidence provide powerful confirmation that, even when horizontal shareholders individually have minority stakes, horizontal shareholding in concentrated markets often has anticompetitive effects. The new economic proofs show that,...

Empirical evidence that horizontal shareholding has created anticompetitive effects in airline and banking markets have produced calls for antitrust enforcement. In response, others have critiqued the airline and banking studies and argued that antitrust law cannot tackle any anticompetitive...

When investors commit capital to a private equity fund, the money is not immediately invested but is called by the fund manager throughout an investment period of up to five years. This business model allows private equity fund managers to invest the committed capital at their own discretion,...

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...