We study the role of legal investor protection for the efficiency of the market for corporate control. Stronger legal investor protection limits the ease with which an acquirer, once in control, can extract private benefits at the expense of non-controlling investors. This, in turn, increases...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>This paper examines the role of legal investor protection for the efficiency of the market for corporate control when bidders are financially constrained. In the model, stronger legal investor protection increases bidders' outside funding capacity. However, absent effective...</p>

The authors propose that dispersed outside ownership and the resulting managerial discretion come with costs but also with benefits. Even when tight control by shareholders is ex post efficient, it constitutes ex ante an expropriation threat that reduces managerial initiative and noncontractible...

A popular view of limited liability in financial contracting is that it is the result of societal preferences agnainst excessive penalties. the view of most financial economists is instead that limited liability emerged as an optimal institution when, in the absence of a clear limit on economic...

Economics and management science share the tradition of ordering risk aversion by ï¬tting the best expected utility (EU) model with a certain utility function to individual data, and then using the utility curvature for each individual as the sole index of risk attitude. (Cumulative) Prospect...

Cumulative Prospect Theory (PT) introduced the weighting of probabilities as an additional component to capture risk attitudes. However, this addition would be a less significant challenge to expected utility theory (EU) if utility curvature and probability weighting showed strong positive...

We experimentally test whether intentional and observable discriminatory pay of symmetric agents in the Winter (2004) game causes low paid agents to reduce effort. We control for intentionality of wages by either allowing a principal to determine wages or by implementing a random process. Our...