We analyze some personal characteristics of the members of the audit committee of the Spanish listed firms and the relation between these characteristics and earnings management. We find a non-linear relation with tenure, so that long tenures can initially compromise the directors' independence...

Using the firms' directors who have a background in politics as a measure of political connections, we analyze the relationship between political ties and dividend policy in a sample of listed Spanish firms. We find that political connections are positively related with cash dividends. This...

This paper analyzes the incentives of large shareholders to implement the corporate governance system that favors their interests within a framework of highly concentrated ownership and poor legal protection for investors. A metric for corporate governance based on the fulfillment of...

This paper analyzes the presence of financial constraints for investment in innovation in Brazil. Dynamic investment models are estimated for a panel dataset of 206 Brazilian nonfinancial firms in the period 1995-2006. Results show that innovation of Brazilian firms is subject to financial...

We analyze the relation between capital structure, ownership structure, and corporate value for a sample of 1,216 firms from 15 European countries. Our results stress two different conflicts of interest and show the differential role played by the mechanisms of corporate control depending on the...

In this paper, the influence of large shareholders on earnings management in family-owned firms is analyzed using a sample of firms from nine European countries. How contests for control for the largest shareholder and the existence of a controlling coalition in family-owned firms affect...

We show the effect of CEOs' characteristics on corporate risk-taking of a hand-collected sample of 369 Latin American listed firms from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru for the period 2005-2020. We study six traits: CEOs’ age, tenure, gender, duality (i.e., holding...

Purpose: This paper studies the impact of CEOs’ personality and social connections on corporate risk-taking in the Russian market. Design/methodology/approach: Using a sample of 93 large listed Russian corporations between 2008 and 2016, we test a range of personal traits, including the...

Purpose: We study the failure of Russian banks between 2012 and 2019. Design/methodology/approach: We analyze the entire population of Russian banks and combine a logit model with the survival analysis. Findings: In addition to the usual determinants, we find that not-failed banks have higher...

We analyse the trend among 79 banks from 20 European countries towards scrip dividends. Whereas banks do not seem to smooth cash dividends, they do smooth total dividends, which include both cash and scrip dividends. We also find that the new legal requirements (resulting from the Basel Accords...