This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal...

In this contribution, at first, we introduce a basic network framework to study pyramidal structures and wedges between ownership and control of companies. Then, we apply it to a dataset of 53.5 million of companies operating in 208 countries. Among others, we detect a strong concentration of...

This study examines whether foreign institutional investors (FIIs) help explain variation in corporate tax avoidance and whether mechanisms such as tax morality, investment horizon, and corporate governance underlie the relation between FIIs and tax avoidance. We find robust evidence that FIIs...

This paper explores the relationship between ownership structure and cost of capital. Prior studies have established links between ownership structure, firm performance and cost of capital but their results are mixed and inconclusive. As ownership structure is one of the important issues faced...

A fast-growing legal literature commenting on a set of empirical papers alleging anticompetitive effects of common ownership claims that the reported effects, if true, would imply that corporate executives violate their fiduciary duty: whereas acting in the interest of common owners can help...

We measure the sensitivity of investment to changes in investment opportunities in the shipping industry and test whether this relation is moderated by ownership concentration. For a sample of 126 globally listed shipping firms, we find that investment in commercial shipping follows freight...

Motivated by a growing interest in the governance role of large shareholders with diversified equity portfolios, we examine the effect of diversified large shareholders on voluntary corporate disclosures. With substantial equity stakes, large shareholders generally have more access to private...

Using a sample of 8,232 firms from 81 countries, we investigate the effect of government ownership on financial constraint and the effect of financial constraint on corporate performance. In addition, we address the moderating role of country-level corruption on those two relationships. Results...